Tag: responsibilities

Summertime Magic

I still remember the satisfying feeling brought on by cleaning all the papers out of my desk and tossing them directly into the trash on the last day of school — no need to so much as glance at any of them. The day’s rising heat brought with it the promise of beach days, long, lazy afternoons punctuated by grape Popsicles, and running leaps through the backyard sprinkler. 

Summer meant visits from the neighborhood ice cream truck, rainbow-colored snow cones, and clusters of sweaty kids clutching damp dollar bills. My sister and I raced around the neighborhood on our bikes (no helmets! no shoes!), completely disregarded all advice regarding sunscreen, and stayed up well past our bedtime every night waiting for the sun to finally go down. Everything we did seemed to have an aura of magic to it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that magic and how I might try to recapture some of it.

When I was growing up, my friends and I were fully present during our summer vacations, no matter what we were doing. We weren’t thinking about all the chores we were supposed to do or that school was starting soon. Whether we were playing kickball with the neighborhood kids, making Italian ice runs to the corner store, or just hanging out on the porch trying to keep cool, that time was ours. We weren’t going to let anyone or anything take it away from us.

It’s rare these days to have any amount of time that’s truly our own. We’re accessible 24/7 on our phones. Our attention is constantly being drawn in ten directions at once by television monitors, emails, the daily news cycle. We’re always worried about the state of our country, the possibility of war, corrupt, evil politicians, the bills we have to pay, the kind of world we’ll leave behind for our kids.

All of those things are pressing, but they’re not going away, at least not anytime soon.

Summer is fleeting. It’s time we took all took a step back and carved out some time to enjoy the smell of freshly cut grass, the way the air smells when a sudden rainstorm hits the hot pavement. We can count the fireflies as they hover and flash on summer nights, and wake up early to hear the songs of morning birds.

We can dig holes in the sand and eat ice cream cones, read novels, stare at the sky, turn the music up loud in the car. We can do whatever we want if we let ourselves, even if it’s just for an hour or a lunch break or between phone calls. It doesn’t even need to cost anything.

The magic is still out there. Go and find it.

ENP

Curveballs

Like most responsible adults, my husband and work all week, pay our bills on time, and strive to take good take care of our family, pets, car, and house. Although we’re often busy, we’re lucky to have a good life (knock on wood). I’m grateful for everything we have and for all the things we’ve accomplished.

I’m not the type of person who usually complains, but the past couple of months have felt like one long workweek. It’s been nearly impossible for us to get a break from our responsibilities, even on weekends.

Dating back to the middle of February, every time my husband and I made plans to do something we wanted to do, something else would come up, giving us no choice but to cancel and deal with whatever issue had reared its head.

It started with our bathroom renovation. Our contractors wanted to work on weekends in order to get the job done faster. This isn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t something we’d anticipated. In order to be home we had to cancel hiking trips we had planned two weeks in a row.

Soon after that, our adult daughter, who is in her early 20s, came home one afternoon and announced that she’d just bought a condo. We were very happy for her, and proud that she’d done it all on her own. Instead of cross country skiing, we spent the following weekend helping her pack up her belongings. The weekend after that, we had planned to snowshoe in the White Mountains. We traded our snowshoes for a rented van and helped her move everything into to her new place.

The weekend after our daughter moved, we had to do our taxes. Because I’m a self-employed writer, this is always an arduous, stressful chore, even with the help of expensive software. Happily, we discovered that we were getting a refund.

We booked a weekend getaway for early April to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

A few days before our trip, a close friend of ours died unexpectedly. Her funeral was planned for the following Saturday. I called the hotel where we had made reservations and asked if we could move our stay up a week. The person I spoke to said we could, but the nightly rate would be more than triple the amount we had originally booked due to it being school vacation week. I cancelled the reservation.

With the exception of 2020, we’ve hosted Easter dinner at our house every year for nearly two decades. We spent the Friday and Saturday before Easter shopping, cleaning the house, planting flowers, coloring eggs, cooking, and driving around to various stores looking for sidewalk chalk to entertain our boredom-prone younger guests.

The day after Easter, I cleaned the house again in between replying to work emails and running errands I didn’t get to on the weekend.

Beginning this Thursday, we have a reservation at a condominium in the Berkshires for four nights. We plan to hike Mount Greylock and the Ice Glen. Maybe we’ll go out for dinner, and cook brunch one day after sleeping in. We might wander around Stockbridge, or visit one of the area’s great museums. And if someone calls, I won’t be answering my phone.

ENP