summertime variety

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kind comments about my last post.  I felt funny to begin with about posting it but there you were.  The long lost friends I have never met. Waiting there, knowing just what to say to pick me up and dust me off.

The exception to this is of course my Uncle John who I affectionately refer to as UJ and AJ his dear little wife.  They are sweet and lovely and I am a lucky niece.  Lucky lucky lucky. UJ and AJ? ILY!

It’s hard for me to talk about my health and truthfully I probably won’t from this point on.  I like this place to be my happy place.  Somewhere I can visit in the future and smile at the memories.

Remember that quote about summer afternoons and beauty? I think by Henry James.  If I wasn’t so lazy I would google it. But isn’t just the bit I know so right?  Isn’t a summer afternoon a beautiful thing?  When it is quiet and stretches before you like a cat waking from a long midday nap.

I love these days home with my kids and yes, there are those days I want to send them outside and lock the door but usually I am happy to spend these warm, willowy days with them.  At my side.  They tell me so much stuff.  I want them to have happy memories of their childhood summers.  What will they remember?  I love it when they are creative and I see the ideas bursting out of their minds.  They create stores and sell their crafts, they write stories and sit and cut paper crafts at the kitchen table.  (Lots of paper crafts with little teeny triangle scraps that flutter here and there on there way to the paper recycling bag.)

In the late afternoon I make supper and when their dad walks in the door we sit at the table and eat.  The children start each conversation at an acceptable volume but by the end of the meal they are loud and animated.  They eat, talk and laugh and I can’t imagine eating at a table without all that.  And if it’s a day when they saw a snake or caught ten night crawlers or oh my gracious saw a bear---we had a bear in the backyard---really we did! Then their voices are so charged with energy and they gulp their food and then as soon as it is appropriate they escape outside and burn it off until it gets dark and I yell to get cleaned up.

Then the day has been spent and I am usually so tired I read half a page and am asleep.  At 8:00!

Tomorrow we will pick up our nephew on the way to the ocean. We will swim in Maine and like my kids act at the dinner table I am so excited.  Swimming is so freeing.  I love it all—except maybe the way the salt water burns the back of your nose when you take in a wave the wrong way.  I love diving into the waves like a dolphin, weightless and smooth.  I bob in the water like a seal, looking at the land and not wanting the sun to dip any lower in the sky—a sure sign it’s time to load our gear into the car and trek home. Swimming is something I have never outgrown.  Growing up my mother would never put her head under water, I remember being so sad that I would grow up and not put my head under.  But I still do.  Will I reach a point when I don’t?  Do you?

I hope your summertime variety is packed with good stuff. 

I will help you think of some things to do:

bring a lawn chair and listen to an outdoor concert

look for four leaf clovers at the park

paint your toenails electric blue (except for you UJ)

offer to read at storytime at the library

make pudding pops

wade across a brook with barefoot with your pants rolled up to your knees

think only optimistic thoughts, at least for one whole day

fix something for someone who needs help fixing things. (mother I will fix something at your house!)

Happy summer!