When you are a child, summer blows into your life like a welcome zephyr. It brings with it the promise of swimming, lemonade, bicycle rides and late nights spent in the humid air. It is endless days of no boundaries. As childhood fades so do those summers. There is no summer for the adult you. You work 365 days a year, in an air conditioned building, having arrived there in your air conditioned car, and the idea that summer is even happening disappears from your conscious. The months seem to bleed into each other with very few landmarks to indicate the passing of the year.
Becoming a parent (and for me, also a teacher) I get the chance to steal summer back. I'm fortunate, that although my summers are not as carefree as they were when I was 10, they do have an element of freedom that my full-time, working peers never get to experience. The idea that I don't HAVE TO get up and go ANYWHERE or see ANYONE or do ANYTHING, is just lovely. We wake up and see how the mood strikes us; "lunch with dad?" Great. "reading circle at the library?" Fantastic. "Watching movies all day while mommy does laundry?" Loving it.
As mothers it is easy to complain about the noise and the chaos that reigns in the house during summer, but is that not what summer is all about? It is about spending all day in your bathing suit. It is eating watermelon off the rind with seeds. It is warm, overly sweet lemonade and even sweeter iced tea. It is sun tans and sun burns and sun screen and sun hats. It is embracing the hope that summer will never end. And as we look at our worn out, crabby from exhaustion, sun tanned children, lets hope it doesn't end.
