On long car trips when I was young, my brothers and I were allowed to take our turn traveling in the ‘way back’ of our boxy brown station wagon we’d named Jason. Nestled in amongst the luggage, it was a cozy nest. Every summer we would travel to Ohio by way of Pennsylvania, visiting both sets of grandparents. There would be summer night porch swings and fireflies and crickets, bug bites, strawberry shortcake for dinner, and the heavy, sticky, thickness of summer humidity as thunderstorms rolled in.
For a few weeks each summer, we were tucked away first in my father’s old bedroom, his long ago horse’s saddle still waiting for him, a confusing contrast between his life now, with me, my brothers and our station wagon and the boy we hadn’t known. Or I’d sleep in my mother’s old bedroom with the white, spindle-legged three-way mirror vanity, where I could see endless reflections of myself replicated down a corridor of glass. I can remember going to bed after my usual bedtime, but while it was still twilight, listening to the adults still awake, distant laughter and words I couldn’t distinguish, dogs barking, the sounds of summer whose bedtime hadn’t yet arrived.
I realize that in fact, those childhood summers may not have been quite as idyllic as I remember. I perhaps applied my mind’s Stardust filter, but the warm glow is palpable. To my parents, they were probably full of concerns about car maintenance, squabbling children, and issues of family dynamics that I had no inkling of, at least not then. Summer may be most magical in retrospect, but that only makes its magic less tangible, not less real.
I always think that each summer is going to involve time standing still. Summer, my tired spirit whispers. A hammock by a stream. A favorite book and a cold, sweating glass pitcher of lemonade that the bees refuse to bother. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in a hammock by a stream. And yet it exists in the peripheral of my memory, much like wartime London or Colonial Williamsburg. I’ve been there in my head so often, I can almost imagine the tin hats, the wagon-rutted streets and the cool water splashing over my ankles. Such is the faulty, magical memory of a reader, and a daydreamer.
As an adult, even as my children achieve the deep tan of childhood that no amount of sunscreen can prevent, I now see summer as a utilitarian reset period. I mean, not only that. There are still some Stardust filters. But by the end of May, I am holding on by a thread. School lunches have gone from thoughtfully packed representations of the food groups to “if you don’t want to buy lunch today, you have two minutes to find something to fill out this mini bagel I threw peanut butter at…”
At the end of May, I am not at my best. But during the summer, I get my mojo back. Long summer nights mean more time, fewer rules. We’re all spun up like tightly wound tops during the school year. But in the summer, we get to spiral down into a slower and slower loop until we’re no longer the bleeding, blending siren of colors of a mini plastic cyclone, but a body at rest. There’s a glowing, perfect moment when you can feel your shoulders relax and your jaw unclench, air fill your lungs. That is the reset. Anything is possible again.
This summer, I did not reset. I am no longer the spinning top, but somehow when the spinning stopped, I didn’t take that deep breath. I didn’t recharge. I spun to stillness, but not rest. My body has stopped accepting sleep as currency, and so I struggle through each day more exhausted than I have been in years. I assume I was more tired than this when the girls were babies, although I can’t specifically recall (probably because I was so tired). Regardless, the only thing that is moving me forward is the thought that I’ve been more tired than this and made it through. (I must have been.)
And so this year, I have a new plan. A non-reset plan. A when instead of a phoenix, I still just have ashes plan.
It’s time to remember that my children are 8 and 10. If they have to put baby carrots into their own snack bags, they can do that. And if they house the butter knives on the far right side of the silverware drawer instead of the far left, it’s fine. And even if they mix the primary silverware with the backup silverware… that’s still okay (I will convince myself it’s okay). If every now and then dinner is a choice between the multiple fun and exciting cereals in the cupboard, everyone will just appreciate spaghetti all the more.
Summer is magic, I think. And not just because of the childhood nostalgia we hold for it, while the adult us works through it, promising ourselves happy hour patios and twilight front porches. I say it because even now, I can hear the crickets, louder than any other nighttime sound. And a dog barking a brief hello, a street or two over. My youngest read me a book about leopard habitats that probably isn’t on the AR list, and no one worried about whether it counted, and we both pictured leopards, asleep by day in the African trees.
Summer is a break from the expectations we assign ourselves. We can spin down. We can daydream. We can reset, if the option avails itself, or we can use it as a soft start evolution of our self-imposed expectations.
Maybe I’ll start a melatonin regimen, we’ll get a new mattress, this soul-sucking election cycle will end, and one day this fall, I’ll wake up a new person. Maybe my reset is just a little delayed this year. In the meantime, no child has ended up in therapy from not having their lunchtime sandwich shaped into a heart…. have they?
