On the Last Day of Summer

It’s the very last day of summer.

It’s just after midnight as I’m writing this. That means it’s the last day of summer, the 21st of September; it’s also the last day I’ll have a preteen instead of a teenager. Adrienne celebrated today with cake and a friend, and then they walked to the high school football game together. She will turn thirteen on Sunday.

It might be the last week I have these sunflowers. I keep trimming off the dead flowers to encourage new buds, but they’re drying out, turning into sticks. Pretty soon, the sticks will go on the compost, and I’ll invite Jimmy’s boy over to dig potatoes again. Pretty soon after that, I’ll spread out the compost and cover up the garden for the year. I’m making such a long list of heirloom seeds to look for from the seed bank. There’s a white sweet corn, and a sunflower called an Indian Blanket, that I just have to try to grow.

It might be the very last week of our dilemma with that lemon of a car I so foolishly named Serendipity. We finally, finally got caught up on the big chunk of rent that we’d fallen behind when I had the bad luck to get sick this summer. This morning, the landlord sent us the official “paid in full” text, yet the bank account was still a positive, one digit number. We’re set until the middle of October. When two of my friends send a bit of help this weekend,  with any luck I might have enough to trade in Serendipity for parts and pay a down payment on another ten-year-old beater. Maybe. I hope so. If things go well, which they hardly ever do. If not, we’ll still be much closer than before. I haven’t been for a drive for exactly three months. And the drought is finally going to give way to rain this week, so I’ll be glad if Adrienne doesn’t have to walk home every day.

It could be that next Sunday, I actually get to church.

I think my religious trauma is still a little too raw to go inside the church, but I could sit outside the church and listen to the organ music. There are some pretty trees near the church; I could lean on them and look up into the dying leaves and not have a panic attack, but still be NEAR church.

I have been talking with Jesus, in the morning and the evening. I have been telling Him how much I miss feeling like He loves me. I’ve been telling Him how much I wished He would give me a sign, just a little one, that there was a mistake– that the religious movement which formed me in the Catholic Church and left me stranded in Steubenville is wrong and not from Him at all, but that He was still with me in it, and is waiting with me now, and will show me how I’m supposed to follow Him in the real world.

I’m not better than people who have been chewed up and spat out by cults like the Charismatic Renewal and decided that there’s no god at all. I’m just not one of them. I still believe. And I don’t want to not believe.

It could be that the not wanting to not believe is the sign from Jesus that He wants me. Or maybe it’s just my stubbornness.

When I was a little girl I would act out elaborate fantasies, pretending to be a nun and a martyr who performed wondrous miracles. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I would just like to find a way to be myself, in Jesus. To be Mary Pezzulo, in Jesus. To grow my garden, and go for swims and hikes, and welcome the neighbor children, and be autistic, and try and write beautiful things, in Jesus.

I’m not so keen on any of the people who presented themselves to me as the only conduits to Jesus. I don’t know if I could ever look at a Franciscan friar without cringing again. If somebody started speaking in tongues and tried to pray over me I’m not sure if I’d fight back or run away. At this moment, I’m not even sure if I could ever walk into a confessional again. But Jesus Himself, that’s different.

Maybe I could even love the Eucharist again.

Maybe I could talk to the Virgin Mary without terror again.

I guess it hasn’t been such a bad summer.

I think it’s going to be all right.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.