Summer has always felt like a time of metamorphosis–a slow, hot catalyst of change. We are separated from our normal routines, allowed to talk to new people, to do weird things, to do nothing. To stew in our thoughts, to take chances outside the watchful eye of our social group or school or office. We are tinkering in our own labs, and every once in a while, we come up with something magnificent.
A few ways I know it’s summer: a sticky trail of popsicles on repeat; sidewalk chalk in great abundance; long, meandering days at the pool or on some sort of adventure; rental bunnies from a local farm. (Yes, we paid to have a small rabbit stay with us for a week, the ethics of which I’m still debating); showers every night; air-conditioning issues.
It took me longer than it should to admit that our downstairs air conditioner completely stopped working this week. Twenty-four-hours into the situation, the slightly uncomfortable temperatures had morphed into a wall of heat impossible to ignore. I commandeered a box fan one of my kids uses to inflate a cloth fort and as I lay in bed sticky and miles away from my husband, I tried to imagine the fan’s jumbo jet roar as the white noise so many people enjoy.
Around four in the morning, our youngest appeared, complaining with complete disregard for the situation at play that upstairs was “too cold”. I threw off the sheet and hurried to one of her sister’s rooms on the second floor where the air had grown blissfully chilly (aka 74 degrees). We snuggled together in her twin bed, and hours later I woke again to her big smile: how did you get here? Usually, I’m shoo-ing her out of my bed, trying to enforce the everyone-in-their-own-space regime. It almost hurt how happy she was to have me all to herself, and I couldn’t shake the idea that she’d been missing something from me.
The books I’m reading recently examine characters’ relationships with their parents–the push to be like them or the pull to be different. Either way, the parents affect the kids, often negatively, through varied means of genetics and projected unrealized ambitions and insecurities. What a daunting and negative way to think about parenthood. And yet, part of me wonders if that’s inevitable: we are each imperfect creatures, and children hold up a mirror for us to see. Sure, it’s depressing–and what about free will and self-awareness and gentle parenting and modeling good behavior–but what if seeing our reflection is the gift? A humbling, instructive gift.
A few weeks ago, one of my daughters asked me to sign her up for a sports try-out. The first one ever. I was surprised and secretly, embarrassingly thrilled by her internal drive to go for it. She reminded me of myself at that age, and as we human creatures are a bit narcissistic, that was comforting. But when I power-walked around her field at the sports mega complex last week–compulsively checking my heart rate in the 90-degree humidity, I didn’t feel that rush of re-finding myself as a confident twelve-year-old. Instead, I felt eerily like my dad.
Many Augusts ago, my dad drove me to campus to try out for the high school field hockey team. I don’t think I noticed him pull a chipping wedge from the back seat, because it surprised me an hour later when a girl asked, “Hey, what is that guy doing? Playing golf?” There was my dad, diligently practicing his chip shot against the back of a school building adjacent to our field, trying to out-work his limited golf talents. I shrugged and avoided claiming him as a direct relative. The possibility that my daughter was feeling the same thing now–wishing I could take my sweaty, red-faced self, trying to eek productivity from the two hours on the field, out of the sightline of her peers–made me laugh.
The air conditioning works now. The rental bunny returned to the farm. And we are entering summer’s zenith, with weeks of tinkering to go. I’m experimenting in my own way, writing weird, beautiful things with Abby Rasminksy’s secret summer school prompts. It’s a joy to write in these short burts, free from ambitions other than to get thoughts, feelings, and words onto a page within the proscribed seven-to-eight minutes.
Last week my husband examined a packet of yeast on the counter, glanced at me in confusion. “For the focaccia bread we’re making,” I said, as if, duh, we bake bread now. My girls and I mixed together flour, salt, yeast, and water and smothered the resulting ball of dough in olive oil. We waited a day for the first rise and then hours for the second before adding more oil, salt and rosemary and popping it all in the oven. Thirty minutes later, we knew we’d made ourselves something magnificent.
[books]
Burst by Mary Otis
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
[things that caught my eye]
Maybe it’s the constant air quality alerts but I’ve been thinking about this article on a small lake outside of Toronto and how it’s basically kept a time capsule of our effects on the earth. I’ve at times lamented how I’m always just walking with friends to spend time with them but truly it’s a gift. The cosmos is a wrinkle in time???
Cheers to rental bunnies, sleeping in our kid’s bed and writing weird!!!!