Summer at home

with long cloudy spaces and a few bright days jammed with flowers.

I look out on the trees clumped along the road, waving in the breeze, and I remember summer in my own hometown - before the introduction of college, jobs, faraway cities.

It was just the road and me then - a long, black curve of asphalt lined with Queen Anne's Lace and powder blue chickory blossoms, winding through the countryside, going nowhere important... except past my childhood friend's house, or to the old Tastee-Freez with creamy white ice cream, or over that small hill where I could see the whole line of Blue Ridge Mountains surrounded by green pasture like a wide picture postcard.

If I followed the road long enough I would see my high school, and expressionless cows blooming like black-and-white mushrooms in a green garden, then the old railroad tracks, and then vast stretches of national forest and Appalachia - complete with log cabins - in the general direction of my favorite camp sites. But if I turned off to the right I would see the small, white church where I asked to be baptized (I remember its green shag carpet well); around the bend stands the brown-roofed house on Crawford Drive where I spent ten years of my life.

The blue sky over the mountains, the peach glow of a clear sunset, the sunlight in the grass and heat in the morning, rest in the shade and tomatoes ripening on the vine, a long, winding, lonely country road...

Time stops along such a curve of pavement; white and gold daisies are neither snobs of century or of person. Daisies do not care if you are eight or 80, or even whether you see them. They will bloom quietly along the roadside, where God scatters their seed, summer after summer in forgotten places.

The road stretched out in the other direction eventually runs into a bigger road, and then a bigger one, until it merges with the interstate, from which you can spend two pleasant hours until the big trucks of Richmond try to wrestle you into the shoulder... you will find signs for a Richmond International Airport, a plane that will take you to Newark, N.J. and then on to Tokyo, then a small plane bound for northern Japan, then a bus, and another bus, and finally a quiet street like mine today, intermittently dark and light as big clouds roll by, smelling of ramen and the last of summer grass. The wind smells of fall.

Far from home but full of memories.

But I would be wrong if I thought those summer days in Virginia would stay the same. My friends have grown up and married, moved away. Someone with a pickup truck lives in my old house, and the roses I planted are in disrepair. Someone I've never met pastors the little white church (which recently acquired a steeple), and few of the teachers left at my high school would know or even recognize me.

Even the last vestige of my childhood memories, the old elementary school building which had been there for decades, joined its predecessors in a pile of rubble next to a huge, new, gleaming brick elementary school. The playground, the cafeteria, the gym echoing of squeaky gym shoes - gone.

There are more malls and fewer farms, more strangers and fewer friends.

What job would a girl with an English degree have there?

The likes of small towns were not made for journalism and big plans.

Instead I am here, watching Japan's short, strange summer unfold, sitting as close to the window as possible to soak up every bit of sun even as I work.

This is God's season, God's time.

Jesus gave up a lot more than a summer when He left Nazareth, feeling perhaps a little torn as I do - He gave up His life.

What if He had stayed there, raised a family, lived the good life with his friends?

Where would we be?

Not here, not saved, not living changed lives.

And what if Paul had lingered in Tarsus, or Abram in Haran, or Ruth in Moab?

There are those who God calls to stay in their hometowns and work for Him, and those He calls to leave - some for a short time, some for a lifetime. But we are all called to make ourselves available to His kingdom - no questions asked.

And sometimes that call leaves us feeling a little far away from everything we know, are familiar with, understand, remember.

But the day will come when summer in north Japan will go on without me, and I will get off the interstate at a little no-name exit in the Shenandoah Valley.

I will see new buildings and old ones, strange cars and familiar hillsides. I will drive through the roads I once knew like my own breath and savor the colors of a Virginia summer.

Maybe it will be less spectacular than I remember. Maybe more.

But two things will almost certainly remain unchanged: wild flowers along the roadside, blooming in delicious, delirious obscurity; and Tastee-Freez ice cream, the best in the world. My favorite has raspberry sauce.

Stop in sometime and see for yourself - my treat.