The four most important summers of my life.

Not in any order of importance:

1. 2015 in Spain. It's recent enough and powerful enough I can still smell, feel, hear just everything. My room, my classroom, my hall, the people, the food, the heat, the metro, the trips, the city, the mountains, the bulls. Just all of it. Oh how I wish it had been a true semester length class. I was a 40-something fake community college student surrounded by 20 somethings and it still worked out. Spain, and specifically the stuff related to my semester abroad are buried deep in me. I get lost when I look at my pics and totally transported back in place and time. I'd never loved a "place" as an adult until then. Wow.

2. 2007 in Iraq. A civilian in a war zone, working for cash. April, May, June. I was supposed to be there a year but Crohns, dysentery and disillusionment all brought me back home. I wouldn't trade anything in the world for this experience and there is quite a bit I'd trade to do it again. I went all over the country, usually on my own, and got to do and see more than most people. It helped me transition to different work for a while stateside. A chance I had to take and I grabbed it and went for it!

3. 2001 in Arizona. I had just graduated from college. I was divorced. I had no job. My degree took me to finish an externship at a hospital in Yuma AZ. Moving from the Cascade mountains and small towns of my young adulthood to the dirt and desert of southern Arizona. To have my first real adult job. To live in the very first town that didn't have family in it. To never be able to visit my kids from first marriage as they lived too far away and I worked constantly at the hospital for free. But I was learning how to do my job. How to live on my own. How to be "me".

4. 1990 in Oregon. I was running away from real life. I just graduated high school. I didn't get into college. I wasn't going on a church mission. I was in a relationship I loved and feared at the same time. I moved to Oregon to live with my grandma from where I had been in Washington. I had no car, just a motorcycle. I just was clueless about life and really about myself. I was gone just for like July, August, Sept. I moved back in October and was married in December. I should have done soooooo many different things that summer but fear and doubt ruled me. Sad.