Summery Sun-Kissed Art and Korean & British Voices
“Jen, check out this new Korean guitarist,” my brother texts me.
Soon, I’m hitting repeat on the young artist’s self-composed guitar song. Jin san Kim’s fingers fly as he picks out alternatingly high fast notes before dipping into plaintive lower keys and chords. His left hand beats out percussion accompaniment on the wooden body of the guitar in between string plucks. His head bowed over the guitar, lost in the music, his black hair brushes his forehead. Light glints off the burnished caramel-colored guitar, Jin san Kim’s black hoodie in stark contrast, and the music hypnotizes. I hit repeat, and look out the open deck door.
Fresh morning air blows in the open deck. Hidden black and white chickadees sing from lush green maple trees, and a blue jay flys by screaming warning.
Summer smells like hot hose water bouncing off bee-balm flower leaves’ oregano fragrance, and rosemary oils from the herb plant brushing against my hands when weeding. Summer tastes like slow savored French press coffee, and velvety green, purple, and yellow wax beans still warm from the vine.
Summer is bare feet on dew-wet grass in the mornings and grass clippings on skin. It is walks with friends, conversations in crowded coffee shops, and endless audio books as I drive, do dishes, make dinner, weed, or even just lounge back in faded black and white striped lawn chairs under the small maple tree that now towers in our backyard.
My last child in the home, sixteen year old Daniel, has been working away at camp for several weeks this summer. My husband and I alternate between missing him and yet also enjoying the early taste of an empty nest. In an empty house to ourselves, it feels like week-long dates in between his hours at work. We’ve played hours of a dragon bird game at the table, leaving the pieces set up languidly, knowing we’d come back to it again. We’ve savored slow mornings together before his work, the deck door open and a cool breeze flowing between the back yard and an open bedroom window in the front. Romance in an empty house looks like many things. Grabbing shoes after supper, we head out for walks in our neighborhoods, stretching further out in our combined desire to be healthier. I lure him into longer walks by asking about a game he is making, and we start to have a regular circuit on tree-covered paths curving through playgrounds, passing dog-walking regulars, and old and new neighborhoods in circular 1950-styled communities.
The free Libby library app on my phone has helped me “read” through over a dozen audio books this spring and summer, and I’m loving this break from my normal work schedule in the school year, when my reading is more limited. May, June, and July have been glutted forays into books, authors’ voices reading their own words– them knowing when to pause and hold a word since it is their own breath and thoughts.
And Art is a living breathing thing we need. Writers who unpeel life’s hardest moments in raw redemptive words. Alexandra Fuller in her memoir Travel Light, Move Fast recalls in her British South African accented voice crowded Budapest streets while her dad dies, as well as the death knell in her stomach when her twenty-year old son Fi dies in a later book. Philip Yancey’s memoir Where the Light Fell and Beth Moore’s All My Knotted Up Life speak it out in their southern voices, the hard mixed in with the hard-fought for truths, redemption, reconciliation, raw wounds healing, beauty in, through, and from the pain. Fiction writers pop in and out of my reading list too, but mostly I’m drawn to nonfiction. History print books trace early church history from 0 Ad to the 300s AD, and I underline in fine pencil, marking names and dates in the margins, loving to learn.
I’ve hit repeat on Jin san Kim’s Crow song too many times to know now. I like to have mesmerizing music on in the background while I write. His hands fly, the music swells from grand crescendo back down to plaintive haunting finger-picked chords, and I wonder what he was feeling and thinking about as he wrote this song. The melody is at once joyous and melancholy.
Summer is savored art. Summer is savored moments, alone and with others.
Chickadees sing. A robin joins in. Jin san Kim’s guitar melodies play, and I click save on my own art project.
A friend and I plan to float in a lake this afternoon. She brings two inflated floating chairs and we slip into amber lake water, squealing a bit usually as we acclimate to the water. Then lying our heads back, we sigh, our faces to the sun and feel summer’s heat brush our skin.
What are you reading or savoring this summer?
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Jennifer speaks often at conferences, retreats, MOPS/MomsNext groups, churches, camps, home school co-ops and more. She loves getting to know people and making new friends.