The Summer Slowdown: How to Savor the Season

How is it that the choicest moments in life – the best of the best – are always and inevitably accompanied by the wail, “It’s going so fast!”? Kids shooting up, growing out of dance tutus and baseball cleats. Lilacs blooming sweet and purple, gone in a flash.  Waxing moon turns fat and golden, starts to wane and another month is gone.

 

July near over already! Frogs in full song and lightning bugs hovering over foxtail tips. Lake water beginning finally to warm, sand hot beneath bare feet. Summer hurrying, hurrying, moving past us almost before we know it is here. 

Impossible to keep it, but there are, I think, ways to slow the forward motion. Rum works. No, don’t laugh, I am completely serious. Malibu and Coke, a wedge of lime, plenty of ice – sip slowly. Ah, the drink of pirates, I can practically see Jack Sparrow dancing on the white sand. Don’t drink this inside, though – get out beneath the stars - lakeside, back porch, next to a bonfire. Perfect, you’ve got summer in an eight ounce glass.

Or this –  sprawl on the porch swing with a good book and and read read read while the lovely lemony sun rays bathe you from head to toe. Read exactly whatever you want to read, gooey romances or outlandish Victorian vampires or Russian spy novels. Plenty of time for literary snobbishness this winter. Summer is a time to indulge.

What about an ice cream cone every time the Tastee Freeze changes their special? If you skip lunch you don’t have to worry about your swimsuit.  (Which you should be living in – it is summer, after all, why aren’t you swimming?)

Crank the windows on your way home from work and drive barefooted with your sunglasses perched on your nose. Black Crowes playing on the radio at a teeth-rattling volume.

Hit the beer gardens, the county fairs, the farmer’s markets. Take your fishing pole to the canal in the evening, when the sun is just pinking over the water.

Most of all, take it all in – the lady bugs, the freshly-mown hay, scent of coconut lotion and cucumbers, taste of watermelon and sweet tea. Gorgeous, glorious, perfect time of year – we won’t gripe about the heat until at least August. 

~ Comment below and share how you savor summertime. :) ~

*Art by Paul Meijering 
 

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Frog Song

            Tonight is the night.

I step outside, barefoot on a lawn soft as grave dirt, to inhale the faintly piquant lemon of magnolias and hear the frog song. A thousand chirring, peeping, cheering voices that hold me enthrall, errands forgotten, while all the summers of my life shuttle past, swift and rolling as the downhill rush of a spring-fed creek.

Copyright Steve Polatnick

            “They’re here,” my mother, daughter, grandmother would say – day gentling into evening, a sky the color of tea roses and violets, and through it all, the song. “Summer’s coming.”

            Oh, summer. The languid air in the valley has a presence that is very nearly tangible, and is at least half made-up of memory. My mother played in this yard as a little girl in the years just following the Great Depression. Hair in a smooth Scout Finch bob, neat patches on her cotton dress, fingers blackberry-stained. The frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I see my own children –

            Here in the same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bugs, their shouts jubilant enough to puncture the soul, to suck the heart out.

            I think that the happiest moments in our lives are overlaid with the deepest sorrow, as though we need to experience the depth of one in order to feel the other. Time wounds us, always, simply by its forward motion.

            But anyway.

            Who on earth first applied the word “croak” to that sound? And could it be further from the truth?