Summer's End

Sandy beach towels, from a pleasure-filled weekend are strewn in the lanai. Unanswered letters, and empty journal pages wait. Zoom meetings go unattended, communication is postponed. The books piled by my bed remain unread. No reading, no writing, no thoughts even. Summer is no time to work. I should have remembered that from other years. Since moving here I am in tune with the rhythms of the ocean. High tide rolling in, waves breaking, wind in the pines. Fog softened mornings with the spay of sea mist settling in my hair. The fog horn on the jetty sounding, and the flapping of cormorants as they dip and dive. I have fallen under their spell. I am flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty. What a wonderful summer, I think, turning it around in my hand. 

Patience is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. The shape of my life is formed by the ongoing, ever-present pandemic and the cancer my husband meets. We walk the beach in silence, but in harmony, all emotions carried out to sea. About a hundred yards from shoreline three pilot whales swim past, moving together like dancers. We stop at the cove and sit for a while, then walk home while the cormorants overhead are flying from the ocean to their resting place at the lagoon. 
 
All summer my social life has been filled with chatting with friends outside, and lots of outdoor to-ing and fro-ing, exploring our new community.
 
It occurs to me that all summer there have been too few empty hours in which to stand alone and find myself. Back in June my single goal was to turn inward and rest my spirit after our great move. But summer is no time to rest. I should have remembered. 
 
Now it is summers end, and I am filled up to the brim. The last of the summer vacationers have packed up and gone home, the beach cottages are vacated. Children are busy with school work now, and summer is spent. 

At night I hear the return of owls. The leaves on the maple trees are falling, poison oak is aflame, wild berries like ruby jewels, cling to spent vines. The pumpkins in the family garden up on the mountain are readying and my thoughts turn to possibilities, past pies to Pumpkin Curry Soup, Pumpkin and Chickpea Satay, roasted pumpkin seeds. 
 
The sand slips softly under my feet. I listen to the wind spilling through the pines. She calls me by name. The tide comes in and the ocean swells and my thoughts turn over like waves on the beach.

Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard


We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. 

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something. 

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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence

 "Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education