I’d never consider summer to be my favorite season. Don’t get me wrong, I love the long days that come with summer and I love the morning sunshine, but fall is my love. Scarves, boots, cups of coffee, it’s like heaven.

But there is definitely something special about summer, too.

A few summers ago I really grew up. It wasn’t intentional but I went to Vancouver, BC, I decided to take my dreams seriously, I watched relationships I’d invested in fall apart, and I built new friendships in unexpected places. It was hard. I worked hard, played hard, and cried hard. But I came out on the other side better than I was before. I don’t even know the 2009 Stacee anymore.

Last summer was a little less emotionally stretching. I no longer found myself with my head on a good friend’s kitchen table, instead I sat upright and was able to carry on grown up conversations while my friend made me tea. I loathed tea, but I spent most of the summer fighting bronchitis so I carried around tea bags and honey in my purse, the only thing that could suppress my cough, to attempt to live a normal life. My family also moved, not many people can say they carried a wash machine from their house to a moving van to a new house while coughing their lung up, but I can. ;] I think I was supposed to learn to slow down… I didn’t fully catch on. But that girl, she, too seems so far away.

I never go into summer knowing it will change me. But right now, curled up in a coffee shop on my lunch break I can already see how different my life has become since this summer started. Yesterday afternoon I went into my day job and was able to cut back my hours in order to give myself more time to pursue my love: photography. I have the title of “Official Photographer” on 3 amazing school campuses, I have photographed 8 weddings this year, and I’m only dreaming of bigger and new things… even things I didn’t know I wanted to do. This summer it seems like the years of hard work and tears are finally paying off. It’s surreal, and I am so thankful. I hope at the end of next summer as I’m pulling out scarves and looking for boots [and trying to ignore the mid-October heat wave that always comes to Southern California haha!] that I’ll be able to reflect on the changes that happen next year and be just as thankful for where God has taken me.

Because no post on here is complete without a photo I’ll leave you with these. :] Yeah, that’s tea right there. This summer I’ve also started eating healthier, and with that I’ve started drinking green tea everyday. Who on earth am I?? ;]