Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Tag Archives: summer


by 1 Comment

Showering in the Louvre.

It was one of the best compliments ever. They were visiting us from the US. After getting ready for the day, he said of my bathroom, “It was like showering in the Louvre.” I’m still beaming. 

Sunday afternoons were always ripe for the dreaming when I was a young girl. Saturdays, my mother did laundry and catch-up work. We often snuck in a trip to the mall if my homework was done. And it always was, by Friday night.  Which left the sweet spot of Sunday afternoon, hovering between the rush of Saturday and Monday’s panic that arrived late Sunday evening. 

In our small apartment, it wasn’t unusual to wish for space. “And if I had a big house,” she said, “I would travel from room to room, each one an adventure.” “Oh yes!” I agreed. And donned in our Saturday clothes, sale tags still hanging, we decorated the imaginary rooms with all of our very real hearts!

I think of it still. Each room an experience. Books and paintings and photos and music. Walls with feeling. A welcome. A gathering. Decorated with the sweet dreams of Sunday afternoons. 

So when he said, it, it wasn’t about the bathroom itself. It was bringing my mother here. To France. It was a gathering of all sweet dreams come true. 

For the same reason I offer the scent of fresh baked cookies to the kitchen painting on a Sunday afternoon. It wafts throughout the house, past Sunday night, into the fresh week’s beginning. The dream continues. Monday promises to carry. 

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

An early promise.

Joie de vivre

I was always aware of time when it came to the things I loved. I thought I could outrun all of it. Pumping my thighs just ahead of aging. If I got up early enough, made a pact with the summer sun not to waste a moment, ran beside Hugo’s golden fields, ate my self-packed lunch in the green of the yard, read books in lakes, rode bike on gravel, hit balls on fields…then summer, (even though deep in the back of my mind I knew it would end), somehow it would always last. The promise still holds.

My mother was that summer. Maybe that’s why I still get up early, to meet her in the promise. To gather in all that I love — the “Joie de vivre” (the joy of life).

Walking on the path yesterday morning here in France, I heard the slow pop of the gravel beneath the approaching car, and I was immediately on Van Dyke Road. I wondered if my new French friend recognized my chubby hand in the gathering heat. Her “Phyllis Norton-like” wave out her rolled-down window told me yes. We both smiled as the years disappeared with each pop under her wheel. We bounced our smiles into the blue of ever and spoke the language, the hope, of youth.

Love and summer make the same promise. So I keep my end and wake up early to gather it in, gather myself in…knowing with each gravelly step, I am home.

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

Without winter’s worry.

Maybe it’s the light. The call of the birds. But I wake up earlier this time of year. I suppose it’s counterintuitive, but there is an eagerness to rush into the morning, as if it were a warm and wandering tiger that I could grab by the tail, and convince it to slow down. To sit with me. To sit with us. To dangle slowly as the ripening peaches on the tree just outside our kitchen window. I know how their skin feels. Like they alone can feel the gentle touch of the sun. Almost weightless without winter’s worry. Trusting as if held in the grace of the branch. Never rushing the ripe. For this brief moment, I just am. 

Maybe it’s the perk of the coffee. The pop of the toaster. But I catch myself in this moment of happiness. And the tiger runs off.  And in catching myself, I guess it ends. But my summer legs tell me it doesn’t have to. My summer heart agrees, and I am back in the moment. I am the tiger. I am the peach. Perhaps even the light. How could summer ever end?

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

Around and under and within.

There’s only so many times, even with youth’s tenacity, that a person can run around a farm house and only come in second place. He was always fast, my cousin Shawn. And while I was happy for him, being related and all, I did want to beat him. We wore a path around our grandparents’ home. My bumper tennis shoes always just in the shadow of his latest trend from New Brighton. I mention it only because that was my first thought — it must be his city shoes that outran my local Iverson’s. Or, I hate to admit it, I did have the thought, well, maybe it was because he was a boy…even then I cringed and ran around again.

He was staying for a week. So I stayed too. Each day we ran in circles. Each day our grandfather walked to the field. Each morning we ate Kellogg’s cereal from the variety pack box. Fueled by pure sugar, we chased the morning down.

Sweaty and fed up with losing by Wednesday noon, I asked my grandfather when he returned for lunch, what was the difference between patience and enough already. He took two steps to my four and said, “work.” “I don’t get it,” I said. “You have to enjoy it somehow, the work of it, or there’s no point.” “But I keep losing?” “But are you having fun?” I started to think. I did like being here. Outside. Summer. Racing. Round and round. I did love it. I smiled and ran to the house.

I think about it now. How he never said anything about his lawn, about the paths we wore so very thin, while his patience never did. I’m sure in his head he must have gotten to “enough already,” with all those grandchildren. All those questions, but it never showed. I guess he loved us.

I can’t tell you if my blue bumper tennis shoes ever crossed the front sidewalk in first place. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. But I ran. We ran. Over and over. Around and under. Within summer’s warmth. And I won.

I’m still winning. Painting in my sketchbook daily, I suppose you could call it work, perhaps patience. Or am I carrying that farmer to his field, step by step? I have no need to finish. I keep on loving.

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

Bar none.

I say it every year, but shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t we? Be excited and completely in awe of summer’s return? I long for it. As if it were the last day of school before release. That first breeze that kisses my newly bared legs erases the years in between and flings open the school doors of youth. It sings the song of children’s laughter — a year’s relief. It races us to the open windowed bus and flies the paper let go from chubby hands. It drops us off one by one into this beginning — this beginning that will last forever, if we just remain in the driveway of summer vacation. But the wiggles in our legs and the jimbles in our hearts say go, Go, GO! And we race in, because joy bars none, and knows no time constraints. 

Is that too much? Too much to expect from summer’s first breeze? No. Never. What does it matter that I haven’t ridden a bus in decades? My knees still quiver in the morning driveway. Ready. Always ready to carry me into the ever of joy.

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

The comfort of shore.

Van Dyke Road separated the two worlds. It was so magical how far crossing one small stretch of gravel could take me. The back of our house faced a sea of grain — Hugo’s field. And in a way, it was like swimming, running through the stalks at full chubby- legged-speed, arms stretched to each side, creating a golden wave. Across the road though, behind Weiss’s house, was a lake. Not a big one. Nor a clean one, of the 10,000 our state touted. We didn’t swim in it. So what was the allure? It had to be the dock. 

Florence and Alvin had a big yard. Bonnie, the daughter, was so much older, that to me, she was just another adult. So there were no arms of youth waving me over to play. I would sneak along the shrub line. Roll down the manicured slope to the lake’s edge. I could hear the dock before I saw it. The wave rocked wood cracking gently. I took off one bumper tennis shoe and placed my lavender-white toes on the sun warmed plank. It was extraordinary. I have no memory of being a shoeless baby, but I imagine at some point some uncle or boisterous neighbor blew their warm breath on my rounded feet, and I knew, standing there, barefoot on Weiss’s dock, this must be exactly how it felt. I giggled like that infant and took off my other shoe. 

I braved each crack to the end. My body craved what my feet already had, so I lay down and let it gather in my arms, legs and back. My fingers danced at my side in the tiny puddles of cool water that gathered in the wood’s unevenness. I don’t know if I saw all the beauty of these imperfections, but I’d like to think I did. 

Who knows how long I stayed. Summer afternoons felt eternal. I guess in a way, they are. I can still rest in that warmth. 

I have written so many times about swimming – in actual lakes. Lake Latoka was only a bike ride away. But just out my door, front and back, oh, how my heart and imagination swam. Daily. And maybe that’s what home is after all…this ability to dream in the comfort of shore. 

The comfort of shore.
Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

The out from under.

There must have been more of it then — the snow. I remember garage doors avalanched. Gravel buried. Yards that melded one into the other on Van Dyke Road. (Aaaaah, the great white equalizer.) And maybe it was youth, or inexperience, or lessons yet unlearned, but I don’t remember ever feeling that we wouldn’t come out from under. Even as abandoned snowmen clung to life beside Spring’s marigolds, I believed in the warmth ahead. 

Perhaps it’s the reasoning for all the lights. On trees and mantles. Candles lit and windows outlined with blinks of eternal hope. I suppose we do everything to keep the warmth alive. We highlight memories. Not to relive the winter, but to point our way to summer’s embrace. To prove to our hearts, and mostly our minds (the heart is always the easier sell) that we can overcome. We can survive. And will. And WILL. 

It’s ironic — this urgency to rush the winter, when it all really goes so fast. To slow it down, I remember the boots tipped over on radiators. Scarves half frozen from breathless gasps captured in the cold. And I think, what haven’t I survived? What haven’t we survived? And I gather in the light — warmed in the “out from under” — and I am saved.

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

Untethered.

I wanted to be excited. I walked and finger rolled the handful of quarters I had saved from cleaning the house each Thursday afternoon. Counting them with each step. Knowing it would only take a couple of them get through the gates of the fairgrounds, a part of me wished for a surprising hole to open in my Herberger basement cut-offs…dropping the silver coins in Kinkead cemetery as I short-cut through, coins that I would once again find as I made my way back home after apologetically waving to my friends on the other side of the Douglas County Fair. But my American-made jeans remained strong, holding the coins, forcing my dusty dragging feet through the turnstile. 

Everyone loved the fair. I wanted to be everyone. But the rides made me sick. The games were rigged. And the food was too expensive.  There was always one girl each year that said, “Come on, you won’t throw up this year, I promise…” Still believing in promises, I would nervously stand in line, double check the lock that the summer carnival worker made, smile as if to warn her, remind her, “you promised.” The spinning would start and my lunch flung somewhere into the crowd. I walked over to the live ponies — all of us tethered to a fair we didn’t want to attend. 

“You know you don’t have to go,” my mother told me when she got home from work. “But everyone goes,” I said, “they love it.” “I don’t,” she said, “I hate it.” There was no hesitation in her voice. No pull of the “they.”  I watched her change out of her work clothes. Placing her shoes back into the original box — no dust on them. Nylons in the sink. Skirt and blouse smoothed and hung. 

She made no promise of where my joy would be…she only slipped three new shiny quarters in my pocket and said, “Do what you love.” 

I still am.

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

Between two adorations.

I have the nose of a canine police dog when it comes to sniffing out the fresh melancholy of an approaching autumn. It started early. Nearing my return to Washington Elementary, I felt it. Not really sick, nor worried. I tried to describe the feeling to my mother. She checked the usual spots. Forehead. No fever. She rubbed my stomach. “Not in my belly really, closer to my heart,” I directed, “kind of jimbly.” She smiled, not in the “something was funny” kind of way, but in the “I know exactly what you’re feeling.” I sat on her lap. “Summer is ending,” she said, “we’ll miss it, won’t we?” “Yes,” I said. “But school is starting, and you love school.” “Yes,” I said, and really meant it. “You’re just fluttering in between. We call it melancholy.” “Melancholy?” It sounded dangerous. “It’s not bad. It’s good actually. A gentle easing into something new. Between the letting go and the moving on. You get to feel the love of both. I think that’s why it feels so full.” I liked that explanation. And I began to like the feeling. Embracing it with the change of each season. 

It came this morning. Filling me from head to toe. Jimbling around my heart. And I am not afraid. I am lapped in my mother’s love, between two adorations —  summer’s fun and autumn’s lessons — and I am saved. 

Shop Now!


by Leave a comment

The Strand.

It was the first gift given to us by Washington Elementary, and one of the most lasting. Plopped randomly on our mats behind her big wooden desk, Mrs. Strand stood before us. We all accessed this new situation. Some through tears. Others laughter. I looked around. Of all the boys and girls, David Holte was the only one from Van Dyke Road — surely an ally if I needed one. One eye remained on him, the other scanned the room. Everything was unfamiliar. Even this way of sitting, cross legged. For the past 90 days or so, I don’t remember even sitting. When the sun came up my legs began to move rapidly, only to come to a screeching halt as it set in the evening. Hands on my bent knees I marveled at how quick they were to obey. So ready to relinquish their bronze color. To give in to the lavender-white just around winter’s corner. My toes still jiggled, perhaps all hope was not lost. They kept time with my fluttering heart. What could she possibly give us, I thought, that was worth letting go of August. Then she asked the question — “What did you do over your summer vacation?”  Thoughts were now audible. There was an excitement in the room. Sweaty thighs lifted above mats. Arms shot in the air. All of it danced above our heads — every lake splash, every bike ridden, baseballs soaring, car windows open, dogs barking, wagons pulled, Dairy Queens and Crazy Dayz on main street — all alive! How did she do it? Even with the windows closed and the door shut, everything got in. We still had everything. And when we shared, we had even more. 

I won’t forget this gift she gave. (It’s not lost on me that it was indeed a “strand,” — one that connected us, and led us forward.) I use it every day. 

August 15th sounds its warning of summer’s end. I miss how easily I used to jump from a cross legged position. I miss my mom. But, joyfully, it still all gets in. All the splashes of laughter and comforts of love. There is still so much more to learn. Days to welcome with fluttering toes and hearts. I’m ready — ready for more. 

Shop Now!