Summer Change

By Beck

Summertime drives me a little bit crazy. It’s great in theory, but like many things that are great in theory (holiday dinners! getting married!), it’s a whole lot irritating. It’s too hot much of the time, and the kids are fretful and melting, little sweaty people whining to go inside and watch some tv now, puh-leeeeez mom. And if it’s not too hot, it’s raining. And there’s something else, too, something hard to articulate – we’re not used to spending so much time together, now that the older two are in school full-time, and they’re not used to having to play together all the time like this. So the first couple of weeks were troublesome, full of shrieking fights and me walking around with a headache.

This past week, though, has been a full change – The Girl and The Boy are now getting along so much better, playing happily (well, reasonably happily) from one end of the day to the other. And we had one of those perfect visit’s to a friend’s house this week, the kind where the kids played beautifully with each other and there was good adult conversation and the sun was shining but REASONABLY and not like it wanted to sear our faces off. And tonight we sat in my parent’s yard and made s’mores and tomorrow we might go off and pick dusty blueberries, letting them fall into plastic margarine tubs, letting our hands and mouths get stained purple, bringing home enough blueberries to make… oh, probably one sparse blueberry pancake.

This is the peak of the summer. This is it, the very sweetest time of the year.

From this point on, the days are going to start getting shorter. Summer will start winding down over the next couple of weeks and we’ll get busy with buying new school clothes and pencils and backpacks, eventually. Maybe we’ll get tired of these bright, hot days, tired of the sweetness of berries in our mouths, the vivid prettiness of flowers growing wild in fields and ditches, tired of long, lazy, pleasant days. It feels crazy to even think about it right now, right in the middle of a near perfect week, my children sleepy and blond from the sun and friends again, crazy to think that this should ever, ever change.

Life does change, though, the days shorter than they were two weeks ago, The Boy running downstairs with a tooth suddenly missing and a new jack-o-lantern grin, and the strawberries we picked last week rotting quietly in the back of the fridge. The Girl likes to press flowers, and a few weeks later they come out, brittle mementos of something pretty and fragile, something that has passed. Oh, summer.

Beck also blogs at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.