It hasn’t begun to feel like summer yet.
Maybe it’s because it’s been cooler than usual. Maybe I’ve got too much on my mind and to-do list. Maybe it’s since I’m no longer teaching summer feels more like a peninsula than its own island.
This holiday weekend my goal is to feel summer.
To that end, dinner al fresco. A radical summer haircut. Dousing myself with sunscreen by day and mosquito repellant by night. Sam and Charlie and me walking after dinner, sleeping with the windows open.
It’s a start.
It’s not the summer of my childhood, sent to bed while it’s still light out, my dad’s cigarette smoke joining the smell of gasoline and fresh-cut grass as he mows the lawn. But it’s this summer, the world still spinning to the familiar cycle of sun bake and cloud burst, cicadas clamoring their ambivalence (hurry! relax!) and I know from experience these days will be like trying to eat ice cream with my bare hands: desperate, delicious, and all the sweeter for what’s lost in the melting.