Pitchy Fan Songs On Summer Nights

I just took a minute to water my flowers out front, quenching their thirst from the day of heat. There was a little frog in my garden, nestled in the cool dirt. Smart little fella. I moved out back to the table, a night time post, out on the deck. This is a first for me, and I will will probably be covered in bites by the time I go in.

I've been carrying around a lot on my mind again. It's rewarded me with a headache the size of Montana. I have all these "unfinished letters" swimming around up there. Words that need to come out, questions to be answered, and closure to be found. I keep trying to go back to the letters, to give the attention they need, but the heat of this evening has dragged me back in a memory instead.

Too hot to sleep, no energy to move, but lingering in the peace of the cooling of the evening settling across the landscape. I remember nights like this as a teenager, in Grandma's tiny house, sweltering in heat. There was a fan on Grandma's floor, or sometimes the chair by the window, that we would sit in front of as kids, and talk into it, laughing at our voices pitching with the spinning blades.

We'd flick the blue buttons, speeding it up, and slowing it down until Grandpa hollered at us to leave it alone. We never left it alone...

And as the fan blows across my own room tonight, my memory shifted to our summer nights. We'd sit for a spell, out on the front deck until darkness fell, and move into the kitchen for a cup of rice crispies. I miss my Gram tonight. I miss what she'd tell me if I asked her my questions. I miss the conversation that would twist in twenty different directions, never knowing what came next, or from where, and I miss what I would learn when I looked back on it.

I am very lonely for her on summer nights like this, and I have extreme gratitude that I was afforded the time and memories I had with her. I think I'll go have my conversation with her, I know she still listens.