Summer’s End

Today is the last day before the first day of Fall classes. Even though I started working on campus last week, it’s really today that marks my summer’s end.

The campus is still relatively quiet…pockets of people here and there, but nothing like the throngs that will swarm the campus come Wednesday and Thursday. I visited the bookstores to make sure the texts I ordered for my class were in (they are) and to go on a small pre-semester tour—see which restaurants are still around, which have become something else, and to just acclimate myself to the campus and surrounding area once again.

In a way, with my summer ending, it’s fitting that I finished reading Ann Brashare’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series last week. You see, it’s in the summer that the magical pants come out of the closet and we join the four protagonists in their journeys and adventures, with each novel coming to an end as the summer in the story ends. I look forward to the January 2007 release of the fourth novel in the series, Forever in Blue.

In the mean time I wanted to take this moment to reflect on my summer…

It’s gone by so fast (then again, they always do), and while I didn’t spend as much time as I initially thought I might with various friends, I do have to say that this was easily the most social summer that I’ve spent in the DC area. I’ve been trying to get out of my shell a bit more, and have succeeded to a degree.

I can’t say that I’ve formed my own “sisterhood” per se, but I’ve definitely joined a fellowship and started to attach myself to communities. I hope that as the pace of the semester speeds up, I’ll be able to maintain these connections, as well as form new ones.

I don’t feel ready for a new year (then again, I almost never do). In the past it’s been because I haven’t liked change…but this time around it feels different—it’s not the CHANGE that I dread/fear, but rather the END that looms in the background, getting closer and closer that I want to stave off.

I’ve learned that not all changes lead to endings, but some certainly do. Okay, so endings can potentially engender beginnings, but at the moment that is hardly a comforting thought.

Maybe if I focused more on the endings I’m making, and on the beginnings I’m creating instead of the endings I’m running head-on into, and the beginnings I’m stumbling on I’d feel different…

In any case, having drawn some inspiration of late from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, here are some of the moments from the novels that I was drawn to capture:

Brashares, Ann. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. New York: Delacorte Press, 2001.

(2) I could tell the pants hadn’t come to our lives because of tragedy. They’d just witnessed one of those regular but painful life transitions. That, it turns out, is The Way of the Pants.

(156) Routine always helped an unsettled mind.

(168) Single-minded to the point of recklessness.

(174) “What are you scared of?” The question got out of Tibby’s mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. “I’m afraid of time,” she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. “I mean, I’m afraid of not having enough time,” she clarified. “Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I’m afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can’t fix them without time. I’m afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.”

(174) Tibby was shaking her head.
“What?” Bailey asked.
“Nothing. Just that you surprise me every day,” Tibby said.
Bailey smiled at her. “I like that you let yourself be surprised.”

(207) She shivered. Her eyes were full. They dripped. From sadness, or strangeness, or love. They were the kind of tears that came when she was just too full. She needed to make a little room. She stared at the sky. It was bigger tonight. Tonight her thoughts roamed out into it, and like Diana had said, they didn’t find anything to bounce off. They just went and went until nothing felt real. Not even the thoughts. Not even thinking itself.”

(235) The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.

(253) She smiled, both inside and out. She’d learned one thing in Santorini. She wasn’t like either of her parents or her sister, but she was just like her Bapi—proud, silent, fearful. Lucky for Bapi, he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it.
Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage.”

(282) It was the first time in days she had felt that particular feeling of looking forward to something.

(293) “What happened in front of my friends felt real. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.”

Not all who wander are lost. J.R.R. Tolkien

Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug. Mark Knopfler

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem. Got that? Coach Brevin



Brashares, Ann. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 2003.

(4) Before the Traveling Pants we didn’t know how to be together when we were apart. We didn’t realize that we are bigger and stronger and longer than the time we spend together. We learned that the first summer.

(187) She wondered what Perry and she wondered about her father. Tragedy brought some families together, maybe, but not hers. Her father never talked about what had happened. He never talked about the things that might lead to talking about what had happened. There were so many things they couldn’t talk about, they had stopped trying to talk about much of anything.

(248) Sometimes you just had to face it. You had to march right into the ugly middle, Tibby told herself. Otherwise you ended up flat against the wall, creeping fearfully around the edge your whole life.

There is no remedy for love but to love more. (Henry David Thoreau)



Brashares, Ann. Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. New York: Delacorte Press, 2005.

(252) As a child, you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes and primary colors. It was if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. (“Lena already knows her colors!”) Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as Lena could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything way more complicated for the subsequent seventy.

(253-254) The trick of drawing was leaving your feelings out, giving them the brutal boot. The deeper trick of drawing was inviting them back in, making nice with them at exactly the right moment, after you were sure your eyes really were working. Fighting and making up.
And so her feelings were coming back in, but they were a [end 253] different kind this time. They were guided by her eyes, rather than the other way around. Tentatively, she let them come. A good drawing was a record of your visual experience, but a beautiful drawing was a record of your feelings about that visual experience. You had to let them come back.

(290) What a pitiful waste she was. She was willing to give away, to throw away, the very best she had. For what? It was one thing to sacrifice yourself for a great cause. It was another to destroy yourself for a person who didn’t even want you. It was an act of self-immolation, a sacrifice nobody wanted, that did nobody any good. What could be more tragic than that?