Slow Summers

Thank you for reading Other Thoughts! If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend and encouraging them to subscribe. Help me reach my goal of 100 subscribers!

My dad was a college professor and I recently learned that he taught classes every summer when I was growing up. I’m sure I was aware of this at the time and it is just one of many things that has faded from my memory, but it helps explain why the summers of my youth had an especially languid, unstructured quality. We would take one family vacation—a few hours in the car and a couple of days at the beach in Corpus Christi or Port Aransas. The hotels were set back from the water behind big dunes and each one had a little station where you stopped to clean off any tar that had collected on your feet and body as you walked along the beach or swam in the Gulf. The waves felt strong and massive against my small frame, the water opaque and murky. The first time I went into the ocean, I got stung by a jellyfish that was so large its tentacles wrapped around my entire body. I had stingy welts all up and down my front and back and I remember my mother making a paste with meat tenderizer and rubbing it all over me. It took me a while before I was willing to go back into the water again.

These trips are my main memories of summer, the rest is a soupy, humid mix of time spent outdoors. We rode bikes, we played soccer. We didn’t climb trees because all the trees were mesquite and covered in thorns. I befriended anyone who had a backyard pool, or a giant trampoline. When we moved from San Antonio to the small town of Seguin where our house backed up to a lazy stretch of the Guadalupe River, we barely went anywhere and my siblings and I spent our days swimming and splashing and hucking black walnut shells at each other as we took turns jumping off the dock, trying to peg the other person in the back before they disappeared under water.

I’m sure my mother was keeping an eye on us, but I’m also not entirely sure because in my memories it’s just the three of us—my brother, my sister, and me—keeping each other entertained. Or it’s me off with my friends, going from one house to the next in the neighborhood, knowing I just needed to be home in time for dinner.

I don’t really like summer. It’s too hot and there are too many mosquitoes and not enough mosquito repellant in the world to keep them off of me. If you want to ensure that you’re never bitten by mosquitoes, come sit next to me because they all swarm toward my apparently delicious blood and leave everyone else in my vicinity alone. I don’t like to be sticky. I don’t like to be sunburned. I don’t like the way everyone wants to socialize by hanging together outside somewhere—street festivals, barbecues, long hours at the pool, or the beach. Outside is where it’s hot and sticky. Outside is where the mosquitoes plot my demise. I get depressed in the summer the way other people get depressed in the winter. I hate the forced excitement of it all (Wooo! Summer!) the way other people hate the forced merriment of the holiday season. Every day we must be doing something. Every day we must be making the most of this time when there’s no school and fewer obligations. This is the season for creating lasting memories for our children and ourselves. I would prefer to sit on my couch in my air-conditioned living room reading a book and feeling smug about how I’m avoiding skin cancer. I just want to eat tomatoes, write my little stories and not talk to anyone until October when the air starts to cool and I’m not feeling as grumpy anymore.

But this is the first true summer break of my son’s life. He is finished with kindergarten, looking forward to first grade, and is genuinely, heartwarmingly pumped about summer. Ask him his favorite thing about this season and he’ll say that you get to eat ice cream, even though there’s an ice cream shop one block from his school and we stopped there nearly every Friday on our walk home, even in January when our lips turned blue and our bodies shivered while we ate our cones. Ice cream is a year-round confection, I don’t care what anybody says. He wants to fill his days with nonstop play. He wants to make memories. He wants me to be a part of it.

I want to be like I remember my mother being: a background presence, a supporting character. I can picture her bright red lipstick, her tan skin, a coral-colored bathing suit. I can hear the sound of her laughing out on the back deck. I can see my dad’s sweat-soaked t-shirt after a run, his straw hat, his hands gesticulating wildly as he tells a story while driving us all to the beach. I should ask them if they remember what a summer with small kids feels like. Did my mom experience a hot irritation every time she had to pack a pool bag for three kids? Did my dad feel overwhelmed when he arrived home at the end of a day of teaching and we swarmed him like hungry mosquitoes, wired from the heat and the excitement of summertime? Were they more a part of my summer experience than I recall them being? Memory has a way of enlarging the aperture of our lives, blurring everything that was not our immediate focus, and when you’re a kid, your immediate focus is always yourself.

I am trying to embrace this summer, my son’s first with the awareness of all that summer entails, and my last with a baby in the house. This time next year, the baby will be a red-cheeked, sweaty-haired toddler and the infant stage of my life will officially be over.

When my son watches tv, he has a habit of stripping all the cushions off the couch and leaving them littered across the living room floor. I joked with him last week that someday when he is grown up and has moved away for college, I will walk into the living room and realize that the couch cushions are always exactly where they should be and I will burst into tears because I miss him so much. It was a snide, silly way of reminding him to put the cushions back when he’s done, but there’s some truth to it too. My heart always aches a bit as one stage of my life closes. When my summers are entirely my own again, to sit inside and read, and joyfully turn down every social invitation should I so choose to, I know that part of me will miss these days of being asked to run through sprinklers and hold dripping popsicles for just a second while my son busies himself with something else.

In the first few days after school let out, we drove up to my parents’ house which sits at the top of a mountain in Western Maryland. Despite one day of rain, the weather was perfect. Cool mornings and evenings, a nice breeze during the days. We played baseball and board games. The baby rested on a blanket in the shade or was lulled to sleep in the swing that hangs from one of the giant maple trees in their yard. It was slow and easy, the way summer should be. My son’s knees were constantly caked with dirt, and his hair was glued to his forehead with sweat. This is how I want to remember him always, his face flushed pink, smiling. I’m curious how he will remember me someday, looking back on these years. I was there, I will tell him. I was always right there—blurred in the background, just out of focus, swatting away mosquitoes as I laughed at his boundless energy, his unbridled joy.

Here are a couple of unfinished drafts of summertime poems I’ve written over the years, which I think capture both a general feeling of summer, and my particular moody nature during this time of year.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published6 a.m on the Last Day of Vacationsun sneaks across the lakesoft stripes of honeyed light breakingalong the ripple of blue a fishjumps, the lone boaton the quiet water driftsinto position, line castback home my worriesgather like dustfilling every cornerI have brought a few with mea clutch of leavesa pocket of twigsI set them upon the waterlet the current gently carry themto some other shore

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHushSix deer make their way across the lawn quiet shadows beckoned from the cradle of the forest by apple trees already bearing fruit —green gems blushing crimson through the grassThe lightning bugs are mostly gonethough a few pop here and there flaring against the fading lightlike wayward sparks from a dying fire. In the trees there is the sound of a bug I cannot name any more than I can name this feeling calling out from the root of me as I sit silently (so the deer will not see me)and pretend I’m not even here