Summertime, Still

Jane reveling in a new 'do

I do this. I revel in the summer lax, the come-what-may lose-yourself-in-play two-novel-a-week simple-supper days. We play in the park, ride bikes, and rub our hands together in anticipation as Travis tries every Saturday morning to perfect the waffle (no Waffle Window here; we must make do). Also we don’t bother bathing sometimes. We say to Jane, “Wasn’t that strawberry jam stain on the corner of your mouth three days ago?” and we realize our delinquency.

Anticipation.

And then: summer begins to end. Bumper crops, bookstores when all the other kids are already in school. It’s wonderful, but also it’s hot, dry, brown. Waning. Or, as a colleague of Travis hilariously and incorrectly referenced Thomas Friedman’s book and said: the world is “hot, flat, and dusty.” We are neither in summer mode nor in fall mode. We are dangling in the nether world of end-of-season. While we don’t want to necessarily give up warm sunshine for those blue-ish frosty winter mornings just yet, Will and Jane come into the kitchen with scarves, gloves, and boots. We are in that glorious and maddening state of anticipation.

Too cool for school with an unintentional 80s flair.

The late summer ennui produces a strange creative release. The kids, as I write, have been downstairs for an hour playing with blocks with the determination of a 4-star general heading a night op. I feel like organizing. Travis comes home and thinks some kind of emergency has occurred, but really, it’s just me rearranging the kitchen. Then the closet, then my writing room. The kids get haircuts. They practice for school hair with Travis’ products. Will loses a tooth. I purge their closets of rogue single socks and too-small clothes—and we slowly shed the old stuff and the carelessness of summer for a fresh start in fall.

Oh but baths are overrated and later today we’ll escape the heat into the public library and then share a Café Rio salad and go to bed too late. Fall is great, fall is coming. But not yet.

Not yet.