It’s the last day of summer vacation, and tomorrow I go back.
Faculty meetings, classroom prep, a fresh roster of sixth graders. I have so much anxiety about it that I don’t want to think about what’s coming, which is exactly why I’m sitting here instead, writing about what’s behind me. I need to remember how this summer started before I let myself dread how it ends.
When it began, I wasn’t sure how I would fill it.
There was a void where my family used to be, a husband and a stepdaughter-shaped hole in my days, and I stood at the edge of June genuinely afraid of all that empty time. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself. I didn’t know who I’d be without dinner to cook and lunches to pack and a household to run.
The single most important thing I learned this summer is that I missed so much while I was cooking dinner.
I was good at it. I loved it, even. But for three years, I spent an hour or two every day standing at a counter, creating something, serving it, and building a life. And it was a life, a real one, with real love in it. But the scenery only changes as much as the variety in my dishes. While I was inside making a house into a home, the sky was doing something extraordinary outside my window every single evening, and I almost never saw it. I’d forgotten I loved the golden hour. I’d forgotten I loved to sit on a seawall with my ukulele and hunt for sea glass while the sun went down over the water. I had traded dusk for banana muffins made from overripe bananas and a running tally of a teenager’s grades. I got so lost in building that I forgot how to simply be.
I found the dawn first, before I ever came back to the sunset.
It was November of 2024. I’d always been a night owl, but my body doesn’t keep steady time on its own, so I decided to borrow the sun’s. It was an idea born while writing my book about living well with bipolar disorder. I wanted to establish myself in the rhythm the light keeps, since the one my brain keeps has always been unreliable. I started rising early and going to the water, and it worked as I expected. I sleep when the sun sleeps now. And as the sun moves through its seasons, so do I. Winter’s hibernation stopped being a depression and became just what it is, less light, less energy, a season for rest. There’s grace in that.
It started as a weekend thing, and then I went back to teaching full-time in January of 2025, and middle school asked a patience of me that high school never had. So, the sunrise became more than a circadian trick. It became my daily fresh start. A new beginning handed to me every morning before the day could ask anything. His mercies, new with the crest of the sun. The river gave me clouds and light, a pier and a bridge, herons and eagles, stillness and grace, and I protected that hour fiercely because it was the one part of the day that was only mine and God’s.
I have missed the sunrise at the York River exactly twice this year. Some things do supersede the ritual.
Just before New Year’s, my husband was admitted to the hospital with the flu. We spent two nights there, and I left him sleeping while I snatched ten minutes at the sunrise and stopped home to feed the dogs. He was released, but symptoms rebounded, so on January 2nd, I drove us back to the ER instead of the pier. I stepped out to watch it rise over the hospital.
The second was my birthday, February 5th. I had a fertility procedure that couldn’t be moved, something I still hoped mattered. I’d taken a half day, so I still went to the river before work in full sunlight, sat still and journaled, processing my thoughts with God.
The sunrise is where I come to terms with whatever life is doing to me. I don’t doubt my spirit takes on the mood of whatever sky I’m sitting under, whether it’s pink and purple along the horizon, or a fireball throwing a rose-colored reflection straight across the water to me, or low gray clouds hanging pregnant and threatening overhead. I sit in it, and it somehow sorts me out.
But the sunset, oh, the sunset I had loved and simply forgotten. Watching the world settle into stillness and laying your burden’s down, you feel a strange sense of how precious time is when the last glimmer of light fades from the horizon, and you remember to be grateful.
When summer came and I stood in that beach chair at the Yorktown pier, afraid of all the empty hours, a thought cut clean through my ruminating. It was weighty and clear and not entirely my own. Dear one, chase the light.
I did. All summer. At sunrise and at sunset and in all the fumbling hours between, learning my camera by trial and a great deal of error, chasing storms I kept missing, trying and failing and trying again to catch lightning.
I’ve learned that the skies here rarely arrive the way they’re forecast. I think it’s all the water, the way we sit surrounded by rivers and bays on this little piece of the peninsula. The storm predicted for three hours out slides back to one, then never lands at all. I still love to watch the sun actually set, but I’ve come to love just as much whatever the water gives up at last light, even in the rain. There is always something. A boat or a bird, a jet ski or a dolphin. Or, like last night, on nearly the last night of summer, lightning.
I’d planned on Fort Monroe, sea glass and a Hampton sunset. But when I left the house just after six, the sky tore open. The storm had shifted, of course it had. I kept my route, threw out my plan, and drove straight out of it.
I didn’t mean to be in the storm. I was just under it. Then, I realized I could get ahead of it, that it was rolling down Route 17 from Yorktown to Hampton on the same path I was driving, so I started pulling off wherever the sky opened up, chasing clear views. In Grafton, I caught my favorite bolt of the whole night.
By the time I reached Fort Monroe, the lots were flooding. So I waited. And here’s the thing, the thing all those failed nights had taught me: I knew what this storm would do. I’d been inside it. I knew it was headed out over the Chesapeake Bay, which meant I could shoot it dry from Fort Monroe Beach. And I did. A second cluster started firing over Mill Creek, and I knew I could catch that one dry from the little pier. And I did.
I saw well over a hundred strikes last night. I caught maybe ten of them. It was electrifying. I was giggling out loud after my first capture back on 17, and by the time I finally made myself head home so I could be up for sunrise, I was driving through the dark with lightning still firing in my mirrors, and I realized I was happy. Genuinely happy. Not the happy that comes from being tethered to another person, the kind that has run my life for years. A different happy. The kind that comes from being connected to the One who made me, who has spent this whole summer handing me gifts at the water’s edge that I did not earn and did not know to ask for.
Summer is ending. Tomorrow it’s meetings and prep and the long, good work of another school year, and I still don’t entirely know how I’ll do it. Same story for twenty years.
But last night, sitting between two walls of lightning with strikes coming down all around me and none of them near me, dry under my little patch of sky while the rain fell in the distance, watching the light fight through the storm until the clouds glowed white and blue on one edge and smoked gray on the other, God had my full attention.
He showed me His grace at the sunrise. He showed me His mercy at the sunset. And last night, on the last night of summer, He showed me His power.
I stood in awe of it, because the same God who commands every light in that sky commands my steps too. I’m weeping as I write this, out of sheer gratitude, because when I scroll back through the highlight reel of this summer I feared would be so empty, it isn’t empty at all. It’s full of light, and full of faces, a dozen of them, people I met at the water’s edge over common ground and common wonder, people who have inspired me and carried me and who I would never in a thousand years have found in my kitchen.
I was so afraid of the void. And God filled it with the sky.
I don’t know how tomorrow goes, I didn’t know how summer break would go either, and look what He did with it. Grace at sunrise. Mercy at sunset. Power in a storm. What’s next?
Summer’s over, but I don’t believe God isn’t done teaching me about who He is. I’ll keep showing up at the sky with a camera in one hand and my heart, trusting in a God who is more powerful than my greatest fears, holding tight to the majesty of lightning and sun alike.
Writer's Growth 