The Summer Beneath Every Summer

There are certain places that seem to exist outside of time.

Not because they remain unchanged, but because they hold every version of us that has ever passed through them.

A childhood bedroom.

A family home.

A road we could drive with our eyes closed.

A dance studio.

A small town by the lake.

And when we return to these places, the years separating then and now seem to dissolve. The distance collapses and the boundaries between past and present become less defined.

We are no longer one age.

We are all of them.

This past weekend I returned to the small Northern California town where I grew up. The town sits on a lake that has quietly witnessed generations come and go. It is a place I have carried with me long after leaving, though I don’t think I fully understood what it meant to me until I returned.

As I drove through familiar streets, slept in the bed of my childhood, visited my high school, and stepped onto the stage where I once danced, I found myself thinking about time.

Not the way we typically think about it… not as something linear, but as something layered.

As though beneath every season of our lives are the ones that came before.

Still present. Still shaping us.

Maybe this is why returning home can feel both comforting and heartbreaking. We come face-to-face with a truth that is difficult to put into words:

Everything changes.

And somehow, everything remains.

The View From the Same Window

The view from my childhood bedroom in the house my parents built hasn’t changed much.

The lake was still the same soft shade of blue. The same mountains still sat in the distance. The same trees seemed untouched by the years that had passed between visits.

This weekend, I looked out that same window.

The view had not changed nearly as much as I had.

The girl who once slept in that room could not have imagined the life that awaited her beyond that window. The people she would love, the heartbreaks she would endure, the versions of herself she would become, or the ways her understanding of family would change over time.

My parents are no longer together. The family that built this house no longer exists in the same form it once did.

And yet, standing there in the room with so many childhood memories, I was struck by how places often outlive the stories they contain.

They witness first steps and final goodbyes. Birthday parties and ordinary Tuesday nights. Family rituals that seem insignificant in the moment but become sacred with distance.

The house remains while the story continues to unfold.

I think this is what feels so disorienting about returning home. We expect to encounter the past, only to discover that the past and present have somehow learned to coexist.

The child who once looked out that window.

The teenager who couldn’t wait to leave.

The woman who returned this weekend.

None of them are gone.

They exist alongside one another, layered like rings within a tree, each season still present within the ones that followed.

Bumps in the Ballerina Bun

Memory is a funny thing. It rarely preserves the moments we think it will.

The things that feel important at the time often fade while seemingly insignificant details remain.

For fifteen years, my sister and I danced at a local studio. Before all the rehearsals and recitals, my dad would help us get ready. He would stand behind us with a brush in one hand and a collection of bobby pins in the other, attempting to create the perfect ballerina bun.

We were not easy customers. There was always something wrong… a bump in the back, a strand out of place, a section that wasn’t smooth enough.

We wanted perfection. He was doing his best.

Looking back, I couldn’t tell you which performances had the smoothest buns or whether every strand stayed in place.

What I remember is my dad trying.

I remember his patience.

I remember him stepping into a world of dance shoes, tights, hairspray, and stage makeup because it mattered to his daughters.

At the time, all I could see were the bumps.

Now, all I can see is the love.

Maybe this is what time does. It gently separates what was essential from what was not.

The imperfections fade into the background and what remains is the devotion beneath them.

Standing on the stage again this weekend, I found myself thinking about all the small acts of love that make up a childhood. The ones that feel ordinary while they are happening and become sacred only in hindsight.

The things we barely notice as children are often the things we cherish most as adults.

Not because they were extraordinary.

But because they were ours.

A Town That Knows Your Name

Growing up in a small town is a unique experience.

Everyone knows everyone. People know your parents, your siblings, where you live, what sport you play, who you’re dating, and often things you’d rather keep to yourself.

There is very little space to be unobserved. Even your becoming happens in public. The versions of you that are experimental, awkward, unfinished—they don’t stay hidden for long. They get witnessed, named, and stored in other people’s memories before you’ve fully understood them yourself.

As a teenager, I hated it.

I wanted anonymity. Freedom. The ability to reinvent myself without carrying the weight of a history that seemed to follow me everywhere I went.

Like many small towns, mine could be both deeply connected and deeply cruel. I was severely bullied my freshman year, and there were seasons when being known felt less like belonging and more like being watched. Like there was no clean slate waiting anywhere—only continuity, whether you wanted it or not.

I couldn’t wait to leave.

I remember thinking adulthood would feel like erasure in the best way. That I could arrive somewhere new and simply be a stranger again. Completely untethered and unwritten.

And eventually, I did leave.

I built a life elsewhere. New routines, new roles, new language for who I had become. Over time, I stopped thinking about the town much at all, except in fragments that would surface unexpectedly—certain roads, certain faces, the way summer light hit the lake in a way I’ve never quite seen replicated anywhere else.

But being back at my high school and running into people I hadn’t seen in years, I found myself feeling something I never expected.

Gratitude.

Not because everyone remembered me, but because they remembered us.

My family.

My home.

The years we spent there.

The life we built along the lake.

There is something so moving about being recognized by people who knew you before you became who you are now. Before your identity got organized around titles and work and all the ways adulthood asks you to define yourself.

Back home, I am still the girl who danced at the studio. The daughter of my parents. The older sister of my siblings. Someone who existed before the language of “becoming a professional” ever entered the room.

For so much of adulthood, we are known for what we do.

Back home, we are remembered for who we were.

And while that once felt confining, it now feels strangely comforting.

Not because the earlier versions of us were more “true,” but because they are still held somewhere outside of us. Because there are people who can say without hesitation, “I remember when…”

Perhaps that is its own kind of continuity. Not the continuity of becoming someone new, but the continuity of being seen across time.

Because the older I get, the more I understand how rare it is to be witnessed across the span of a lifetime.

To have people who remember the beginning.

To have a place that remembers, too.

The Final Recital

The reason I came home wasn’t just to come home. It was to surprise our childhood dance teacher at her final recital.

She taught me from the time I was three years old until I was eighteen. Which means she was there for nearly every version of me that existed before I had language for who I was becoming.

The studio was a second home in the most literal way.

Hours every week. Years stacked on top of years. The ritual of arriving, changing shoes, pulling hair back, warming up bodies that were still learning how to live inside themselves.

It wasn’t just dance.

It was repetition, correction, attunement.

It was being watched closely enough to be guided, but not so tightly that you couldn’t explore. There was a kind of relational rhythm in it that I didn’t understand at the time but recognize now as something close to secure attachment—this balance of optimal frustration and optimal gratification. Being asked to try again, and being met there. Being pushed, and also being held. Learning that growth could happen inside relationship, not outside of it.

In a way, she was a mother figure to so many of us.

Not in place of our mothers, but alongside them. A different kind of shaping. A different kind of witnessing. One that lived in bodies more than words.

So many memories are still stored in that studio.

Not just events, but entire versions of myself.

Each dance tied to a song. Each routine carrying a season of life.

The choreography is like a catalog of who I was at the time I learned it. Who I was becoming without knowing it.

My senior solo was to Gone Away by Safety Suit. I remember what it felt like to try to hold something emotional inside movement—how grief and transition and growing up all got translated into counts and the space between steps. At the time, I thought I was just performing.

Now I understand I was already rehearsing for separation. For leaving. For becoming someone who would one day look back at all of it from a distance.

Being back there for her final recital felt like time folding in on itself.

We were returning to dance for her—to honor her.

To step back onto a stage lit bright with everything she had poured into us over the years with other alumni who had all been shaped by her in different seasons of life.

It felt like standing inside a living archive of her work. And somewhere in that gathering, there was this recognition that we had all been signed into her life in different ways. Our names on the studio wall, years of them layered on top of each other, and now hers finally there too. The teacher becoming part of the same record she had spent her life holding for everyone else.

There’s something about that kind of ritual. The returning, the dancing, the leaving.

Not just an ending, but a full-circle offering. Like all those years of being shaped there never fully stopped living in me.

And lately, I’ve been listening to End of Beginning by Djo. It names something I didn’t have language for until now. That strange emotional experience of returning to where you started and realizing you are no longer inside the beginning, but you are not separate from it either.

It feels like that’s what this trip was.

Not a return.

Not an ending.

But a moment where the beginning and the end are in the same room.

Where Time Waits for Us

Summer has always been my favorite season.

I think it’s because of our lake.

Every summer growing up was spent in that water. Hours that didn’t feel like hours. Skin sun-warmed, hair drying in the backyard, running barefoot between inside and outside like there was no clear edge between the two.

Being back in that same water this weekend felt nourishing in a way I didn’t expect. It reminded me of something that never really left.

The pool still feels like home. The lake still moves the same way. The light still breaks across it in the morning like it always has. There are parts of these waters that feel untouched by everything that has changed in me.

And I found myself noticing my dad doing the same yard work he’s always done. For a minute, I couldn’t tell he had aged. He looked like the same version of himself from before life took hold of everything—before separation, before illness, before all the things that subtly changed the shape of him.

There’s a grief that comes with that.

The awareness that the home I grew up in is no longer held by both of my parents in the same way. That the house I always thought of as permanent is now something that might not stay ours. That one day it may belong to someone else, or no one at all, and I don’t know what that will feel like yet.

It’s strange how a place can feel both permanent and temporary at the same time.

I keep thinking about how summers used to feel like they would stretch on forever. Now they feel like something I move through more quickly than I can hold onto.

And still, something in me softens near the lake. Like it recognizes me before I recognize it.

There are parts of growing up that still feel like they’re there. Not as something I can go back to, but as something that shaped the way I move through places, the way I see light on water, the way summer feels in my body.

Maybe that’s what I’m noticing now.

That nothing really stays in the form it began in.

Not places. Not people. Not time.

And yet something of them remains intact even as everything changes.

Standing in all these moments in the thick of a summer solstice evening in my hometown—on stage dancing for our beloved teacher, in my childhood kitchen with high school friends, floating in the same pool I spent all my summers in growing up—I felt that again.

Not a return.

Not an ending.

Just time, moving through everything I thought I had already left behind.

Waiting for us, the whole time, to notice we were already inside it.

Thank you, Lakeport, for holding me through all of it—for letting the summers stay the same even as everything else changed.