The Summers That Stay With You

There are places in this world that don’t just hold memories, they hold pieces of who we are. For me, it’s a small cabin tucked into the mountains of North Carolina.

When I was younger, my mom, my two younger sisters, and I would make the long drive up each summer. By then, my grandparents had already passed on, but somehow they never really felt gone. The cabin still carried them ~ in the walls, in the quiet, in the way the light came through the windows in the late afternoon.

We always stayed the entire summer, and those were some of the happiest moments of my life.

We cooked together most nights. We made real meals, the kind that take time and fill the whole space with warmth. Every summer, without fail, we made homemade carrot cake at least twice. 

Making the cake became one of those beautiful moments when we all came together ~ shoulder to shoulder in that small kitchen, completely present, completely there.

We used my grandmother’s old Sunbeam mixer, the one that hummed in that familiar, steady way. Her dishes lined the counters, the same ones she used, the same ones we remembered. When we used her mixer, her dishes, her cast iron cookware, her oven ~ she came to life. Not in a way you could see… but in a way you could feel.

And when the cake baked, the smell would fill the cabin in a way that felt almost sacred. It was as if she was right there with us. Nothing had changed. Not really.

Time, though, has a way of quietly reshaping everything.

My mom is older now. She doesn’t get around the way she used to. One of my sisters… she’s gone. We lost her many years ago, and that kind of loss never fully leaves, it just softens in different ways over time. And my other sister and I… life took us down different paths, shaped by things that are hard to explain and harder to mend.

There are days when the weight of it all feels heavy.

When I think about those summers, and how full they were, and how different everything is now… it can feel like something has been lost that I can’t quite get back.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: we don’t lose those moments. We carry them ~ in the way we cook, in the smells that stop us in our tracks, in the quiet memories that rise up when we least expect them, in the strength we didn’t know we had but somehow keep finding anyway.

Those summers didn’t disappear. They became part of me.

And even in the sadness, even in the distance and the loss, there is still something steady underneath it all. Love doesn’t leave. It changes form. It settles into us. It becomes the reason we keep going.

I still carry those summers with me. Every single one of them.