For the next year, every month we will be pulling prompts from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and sharing our own responses with our community. You can try out the prompt with friends or over your own BreakBread gathering, an intentional process that weaves respect, care, and trust into our connection with each other. We believe shifts in how we gather can shift the conversation.
Ok, now…my own response to the prompt, “What Makes for a Memorable Summer?”
I write this as 3 ducklings and 1 chick are pecking at grass for bugs, slapping webbed feet against the wet Massachusetts ground, taking high summer dunks in the water basin under the sprawling maple tree. We had our own dunk in Hadley pond yesterday. We traipsed through a moody pine forest, padded with dry needles, the darkness a nod to fall, just around the corner.
The days slowly shorten as we grasp for watermelon, cherries, ice tea and laughter knowing that Autumn light is just a month or so away.
We head back from the pond just before a crack of thunder breaks into sheets of rain.
When I try to “remember” summer, I often flash to the summer we spent in Clarkton, Virginia when I was about 10. My dad worked as an interim minister before his last year of seminary. Picture this: the end of a long country road, a small but cared-for modest white church attended by neighbors – all mostly related with the last name Woosley (pronounced ooo-sley). Friendly strangers and church picnics that included baseball, honest-to-goodness real clogging where skirts and fiddles flew with wild heart precision and me: enamored, watching, running, dancing, playing soaking in the gifts of summer and the heat of the south.
For me, a memorable summer is the feeling of the hot sun melting away worry, work, and aspiration off my resting body. The picture of park picnics, bright yellow dresses and bare shoulders. The sound of cicadas calling for “togetherness” in a sharp, hot, soupy buzz.
But why does a memorable summer matter?
Summer connects us to our humanity, our animal instinct of relishing in the abundance of eating roadside berries, or sleeping under the maple tree when the sun is too much. I know when I don’t get to experience summer at its peak – I feel robbed of something essential. I feel dark, subpar, not quite ok. I have had summers like that.
That’s me, what about you? Is summer a bliss or a bomb? Maybe it’s racked with challenges or stories of loss? Maybe for you your “memorable” isn’t as sun soaked and frolicky. Remember, BreakBread prompts are designed to be shared in conversation, with another or a group of others. It’s an opportunity to know each other and ourselves more deeply and to celebrate the multiplicity of our experiences and to weave our connections deliberately and graciously. So, yes, feel free to contemplate this on your own, but the real opportunity is bringing this question to your friends, family and community.
For you, what makes for a memorable summer?