Summer

It’s finally time.  In exactly a few days, I will be on my way to Sweden for one entire year.  As I pack and sort and worry, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my summer.  A summer that I expected to be smooth and fun and easy.  But, my best friend TK was killed by a drunk driver on June 25^th and I met an incredible South African boy that thinks I am pretty wonderful too.

At midnight, on June 25^th, I got a phone call from a friend telling me that a good friend of mine had died, he kept seeing it on Facebook.  I said, “You have to tell me, I don’t have the internet.”  He said it was Theresa Kroes and that she was killed in a car crash.  I wanted to cry but couldn’t, instead my stomach felt sick. I didn’t sleep the entire night.   

 TK was my best friend.  We met on my first day of college and she helped me through the cafeteria procedure and thought I was funny for not understanding it.  That first year, she taught me to make coffee in my dorm room and we watched episodes of Full House every day on her futon.  We spent Valentine’s days together and visited each other’s home towns in the summer.  We share the same middle name, Jean, and my favorite compliment is when people told us we could be sisters. 

Once, I went with her to spend a weekend at grandparent’s cottage on Lake Winnebago.  It was October so it was too cold to swim and almost too cold to have a campfire.  We listened to Michael Jackson the entire drive there and bought Mike’s Hard Lemonades.  Before bed, TK told me there wasn’t any heat in the cottage.  We decided to pull a Little House on the Prairie to keep warm; so we put large rocks in the campfire and heated them up.  We slept with the rocks in our beds next to our feet.  We thought it was so funny. 

TK was so good at the piano, but she never bragged about her talents.  She was excited, nervous, and anxious about the future but she lived completely, happily and contentedly in the present. 

When she died, Tebogo was there for me every second.  I think that’s when I realized it was so much more than a summer fling.  And at the beginning of summer, that’s all I was really looking for.  Meeting Tebogo this summer was bad timing, but I really needed him too.  Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. 

So, though I am heart broken to not be able to tell TK about my Swedish adventures, my heart soars when I think about seeing Tebogo for the next time.