2020: May-July.

Halfway through 2020, the summer we spend most of the year waiting for arrives. It brings with it the full weight of joyful promises and optimistic mountain objectives from summers past, and our muscles ache not from bracing ourselves against winter’s bitter chill, but from throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into the warmest days we’ll have all year. There’s no time to waste.

We began our season in earnest by starting our herb garden, making planter boxes for tomatoes, basil, chives, coriander and more. As I write, the tomato plants (only 5 weeks old) loom over the rest of the herbs, 4 ft. tall giants sporting many a flower. We planted green onions and garlic, store-bought vegetables now living in our house instead of rotting away, discarded scraps on a landfill somewhere.

Still working from home, I no longer have to stare wistfully at the sunshine from my desk. On the warmest, brightest days, I take my lunch breaks outside, running to the river and back, a 6km circuit to help me clear my mind and train for many hiking days to come. Some evenings, we’ve enjoyed our dinner as a picnic outside with friends. Hiking takes up our weekends once more, and I am reminded of how much I crave the sun, and how happy I am when I am moving—doubly so if I get to enjoy both in nature. Physical distancing is easy when the mountains are your playground. As our thirst for summer grows, we start excitedly dreaming of all the things we could do for the rest of the season, and yearning for time off to enjoy it. So we book time off work to drive to Ontario to visit Justin’s family in early July; our first long roadtrip together, and Freya’s first roadtrip with us. The four day drive across the country will feel long and challenging at times, but I’m looking forward to camping and embarking on this adventure with my favourite human and my favourite canine.

In these pictures, Freya turns 8 and 9 months old. She loves the water, and it’s impossible to keep her out of it. We introduce her to summer and all it means, and what it means for us.

I have fallen back into reading every day. Reading was arguably one of the first things I fell in love with as a child, and COVID-19 helped me get back into the habit. Being able to retreat from the world with my nose in a book is once again one of the highlights of my day. It is an especially important safe place in a time where my emotional bandwidth is taken up by the events of the world; with racism and injustice weighing heavily on my mind (I wrote a little about that in this post).

A few days before our roadtrip, Justin comes home and surprises me with a head of short hair. After 18 years of having long, curly blonde locks, he decided to cut it all off while he was at work without telling anyone. We hid it from his family, a surprise for when we arrived at the farm. It took me days to adjust, constantly looking at him, seeing him anew, yet still familiar—still himself, perhaps even more himself, a man I’ve come to know and grow alongside.

There hasn’t been as much rain this summer as there was last year, allowing us to make the most of it with friends. Now it is July, and we embark on our roadtrip out east to the farm, where we’ll be greeted with humidity and temperatures above 30ºC, an abundance of sunlight, warm lakes, trees and animals. When we return, tired but content, we’ll begin training for our 4-day hike into Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park, our first big backcountry trip since Berg Lake.