Summer has been so good in that way you absolutely know it’ll be. Its tagline is freedom, and everyone feels it.
I like watching the kids mill around the yard, circling their own lives the way dogs circle the ground before dropping into a nap. Sometimes, the day yawns scarily ahead of us like this chasm of sticky boredom that you could fall into and become too apathetic to ever climb out of. But really, it’s never like that. There are grasshoppers to catch, dams to construct in the sand pile and the magic that springs forth from imaginations unshackled. The unschooling credo, “the whole world is our classroom” feels like what happens everyday when I open the front door.
And now, late August, I have that vague, unsettling feeling of arriving at the halfway point of something fleetingly precious, like a brownie from Bread, or a good book, or ... a season.
And goodness, summer is a festival of everything that winter is not, namely life bursting from every crack of Earth and sky. Stepping out in a T-shirt at 7 a.m. to retrieve a palmful of tomatoes and a swiss chard bouquet for the morning omelet is the new normal, and I could get used to this.
The kids need nothing more than to be turned loose (at the river, in the woods, in their very own yard, in the Ott’s raspberry patch, where the term “cash crop” was lost on the 6- and 8-year-old raspberry guzzlers). In fact, my new job description as parent is: the one who turns the children loose. Every child I see wears a veneer of summertime freedom, and it looks good on them. And yet, change is in the air.
Each season is such a sensory immersion in now. It’s like during forever-January when I’m puttering along indoors wondering vaguely what it feels like to be outside in a T-shirt, and then suddenly, the snow melts, green things emerge from nothingness and I’m a parody of my own surprise: smacking my head because who knew spring was going to arrive, again.
And really, something is always slipping away while the next thing presents itself as unsentimentally as green growth in spring. Recently, I attended a talk at The Durango Dharma Center on “transforming relationships” (hint: it starts with transforming ourselves). There’s love, the speaker said, and there’s attachment. Love feels like this: “I want you to be happy.” Attachment feels like this: “I want you to make me happy.” Attachment to summer feels like this: “don’t leave me.” Love of summer feels like this: “I’m glad to see you.”
I’m working on freely, unconditionally loving summer rather than being the one who needs to be pried, blubbering, from the squash patch in a month. I want to step into the stream of summer-everythingness, rather than wring my hands on the shore over what’s already sailed past. Even if I have to put my free-love costume on over my true self, the one who flinches writing the date – August! – on a check. The one who wants to apply for an extended visa for summer to stay just a little longer.
So, I’m practicing.
Summer, I’m glad to see you.
Reach Rachel Turiel at sanjuandrive@frontier.net.Visit her blog, 6512 and growing, on raising children, chickens and other messy, rewarding endeavors at 6,512 feet.
