June

Have you heard it?  That awesome sauce song by Twenty One Pilots, "Stressed out"??

My name is blurryface and I  care what you think.  . .

Anyway, I'll get back to the song in a little bit.  So June is here and I have a love/ hate relationship with June. I love June for her hint of summer, teasing us with hot days and getting our summer dreaming on,  I love June for coaxing open the sleeping Rhododendrons  and breathing life into the Hydrangeas,  I  love June for the end of the school year memories and anticipation of hotter July days and nights and everything that comes with that- memories of Duck Lake channel with my mom and sisters, memories of Duck Lake channel with friends and a rope swing that entertained us for hours and memories of Duck Lake channel skinny dipping later in life- sorry mom and dad. It happens.

But then I  hate June, I hate her for bringing an end to the soccer season,  I hate her for honoring the mighty mosquito and creepy green stringy worms, I hate her for making me realize I'm closer to having one daughter graduate, one starting kindergarten and one entering middle school years,  but most of all I hate her for taking my grandma. . .

June used to be one of my favorite times with my grandma,  it meant the end of school so I could go to her house whenever I wanted,  I could go to TOPS with her on Wednesday mornings,  I  could wake up to the sound of a chainsaw and know that I could run out in the woods to find her and my grandpa cutting wood and play in the sawdust crawling with carpenter ants,  it meant running in her sprinklers, it meant eating bowls of ice cream with her,  it meant a creaky, rickety old metal fan in each of her doorways that would make me talk robot, it meant cucumbers and strawberries from the garden.  . .

Oh how I  miss all of that,  how I miss her.

The other day at work, I was walking in the hallway and stopped dead in my tracks and stood there,  I  must have looked crazy because one of our security officers said "You OK? Something wrong? " and I  said "My grandma, I  just got a big whiff of her", and he said "Oh! Maybe she's here to see you? " and I  told him that she passed away 5 years ago. He came closer,  quietly, looked at me with a tear starting in his eye and said "I lost my wife many years ago. . . I know exactly what you mean,  you stand right here and you enjoy every second of it. . ." And I  did.

Now,  the song comes into perspective, if you haven't heard,  you must.  It's the best, my favorite part? (And you have to do this in your best rapping imitation )

"Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young,
How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from,
I'd make a candle out of it if I ever found it,
Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I'd probably only sell one,

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose,
Same clothes homegrown a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam,
But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered"

And it did,  for those few short moments, took me back to when nothing really mattered.