Hi, I’ll introduce myself because I doubt you know the reason for this post. This is the 20SB.net Blog Swap, and I go by the name ‘Lafhert’. I’m a 23-year-old student and burgeoning pilot currently living and training in Texas. You can find me at my own blog here. The topic for today’s blog swap is our thoughts on the summer season.

Summer doesn’t mean what it used to anymore.

As an adult, summer is just an added layer of stress to a job and to all the other responsibilities at your feet. But the childhood definition, of being free from the constraints of responsibility and schedules, does remind me of one good memory.

In the state where I grew up, the law was to get your permit at 16, and your full license six months later. Due to a birthday which made me the youngest in my class, I didn’t get my license until near the end of my junior year. Up until then, I’d been riding the bus to and from school, but after I got my license, it didn’t take but a $5 school parking permit and I was driving myself.

In high school, I lived just outside of a city of about 100,000, give or take. It was a 10-minute drive to school, but in those ten minutes, I’d cross a border between the rural outdoors and the sanctimonious glitter of suburbia.

There was a road that I took going home that still gives me some measure of glee. It was fairly rural, with very little traffic most days. The road had all the curves of a Formula 1 race, and the wave motion of the hills and valleys never failed to give me that lightheaded feeling.

It was the freedom; it was the windows down and the radio blaring. It was the trip home from visiting a friend’s house or the movie theatre on a weeknight. That stretch of road is what ties me to my hometown and to my adolescence. I’ll keep that road in mind as I continue to grow and go wherever life takes me: The ups and downs, the hills and valleys; the road that takes me home.