Waiting for Summer

It’s late January. Snow patches still line the roads. Temperatures still require coats, and mittens, and hats. And there is still a fairly good chance that an extra ten to fifteen minutes of time will be needed on any given morning to clear snow or scrape frost from our van windows before I can drive the small posse of children that live in my neighborhood to school.

I saw two robins yesterday – which always excites me with the possibility of a spring; but winter’s reign will likely last for weeks (if not months) yet.

Our little family doesn’t actually mind the weather too much (after all, the kids new Christmas sleds are still itching to be used, and there’s hot-cocoa in the cupboard – always waiting eagerly to be made). Still . . . we are all, quite definitely, waiting for summer.

Or, perhaps, I should have said Summer.

A slight difference that -- a capital verses a lower-case s. But, a tremendous difference to us. An eternal one. Because, while most summers will come and go in our lives in much the same fashion, this particular Summer will come . . . and stay.

For sometime, on or around July 29th, we expect to see summer personified: warmth and brightness, laughter and charm, yellow summer hair and blue-sky eyes all wrapped into a real, live, and tiny human.

Our soon-to-be, permanent, and very own Summer.

I’ve been waiting for her. For five plus years I’ve been wondering when she’d be coming. It’s such a relief to know she’s finally on her way. . . .