Sweet Summer

Summer is my favorite season. I say that about every season in its prime, so don’t mind me in a few months, when the leaves are ablaze in the colors of autumn and the air is perfectly crisp and I claim fall is my favorite, or when winter arrives all white and frosty and magical and I announce it is my preferred season, then months later embrace the reawakening of spring as the best. Right now, my love affair is with summer.

At some point, several years into adulthood, it struck me that although I no longer had that last-day-of school excitement, with summer’s carefree days stretching infinitely into the hazy heat of the season, I still thrilled at the arrival of summer. So ingrained was that feeling of summer freedom that I felt it as the days lengthened and warmed as clearly as I had as a kid, even though my schedule of work and responsibility was the same now in July as it was in November or March.

Maybe that lingering sense of summer freedom is because I have always lived in places where summer – with its warmth and color and long days – is fleeting. Or maybe it’s that I have so many good memories of the season from my childhood – hiking with my family, lazy afternoons of reading in the backyard hammock, time in the garden with my mother, catching fireflies just after dusk, sparklers on the 4^th of July by the backyard campfire, countless hours spent kicking a soccer ball, and one epic cross-country journey with my parents and brothers and a pop-up camper. 

Whatever the reason, now that I have kids who fully embrace the joys of summer – kids old enough to put on their own sunscreen and carry their own backpacks, but still a few years away from summer jobs and the dreaded teenage years of being too hip to hang with Mom – summer has regained that sense of freedom and insouciance.

Here are some of the things I love about summer:

·         Jumping into cool water on a hot day.

·         Reading by the big window in our living room – or on the front porch – after the kids are tucked in, as twilight slowly engulfs the mountains, passing through an impossible array of subtle hues on its way to full dark.

·         The smell of roses: heady and heavenly.

·         The sparkle of a thousand fireflies twinkling across the field, as close to magic as anything I’ve seen.

·         Family soccer games in the front yard.

·         Watching my children fall into books and get lost there for chunks of time – bed time, after breakfast time, by the pool or river time.

·         Clean sheets dried on the clothesline and smelling of sunshine.

·         Color. So much color.

·         Flowers picked from the field and the garden and placed in a simple glass jar on the dining room table.

·         Birdsong, even the annoyingly redundant call of the catbird at dawn.

·         Vegetables gathered from the garden: the succulent result of the tilling and planting and weeding and watering.

·         Trips to the ocean.

·         Bike rides through the woods.

·         Outings with friends and our combined gaggle of children.

·         (Mostly) unrushed mornings – and not having to pack lunches every single day.

·         Thunder echoing through the mountains and the cooling rain which often follows.

·         The games my children imagine together, whether they are pretending to be wild animals (sometimes not much of a stretch) or building a fort in the woods by the river.

·         Running in the quiet and relative coolness of early morning.

·         Fresh, wild berries, found unexpectedly and consumed on the spot – or gathered purposefully and tucked into the freezer for less bountiful days to come.

·         Flip-flops. Or, even better, going barefoot.

·         Campfires and s’mores and late-night laughter.

·         Standing atop a tall mountain with my children, who are still discovering how much they can do, how far they can climb – and who still want me along for the adventure.

There are hitches in all this summer freedom, of course. Often the garden goes unweeded, becoming jungle-like while we are off hiking and splashing in the river. All those house projects I swore I’d tackle this season get pushed, once again, to next season’s to-do list. And my work hours are severely diminished in these weeks when the kids are with me nearly all the time.

When I ask my children, though, what they love most about summer, all three place “spending more time with my family” at the top of the list. Perhaps this will not always be their favorite part of summer; certainly they will outgrow this self-sufficient-yet-still-ingenuous phase, as they have outgrown other childhood phases.

So I am taking advantage of these days when they want to do things, go places, explore and adventure together. Someday, I hope, when they have moved beyond the enchanting freedom of their childhood summers, they will still thrill at the season’s arrival, still embrace the simple joys of summer, still remember all the sweet summer fun we had together. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 22, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Summer reading

People have been reinventing the way we tell – and hear – stories since there have been human stories to share. The petroglyphs on the cave wall gave way to stone tablets, which evolved to ink and paper. Stories told around the fire turned to families gathered around the radio, then the big screen of the movie theater, and eventually the television in every living room. Now we can stream movies through our laptop computers and read books on our smart phones.

No matter the medium for telling them, there are some stories that become favorites. It is these we turn to again and again, whether cherished family tales or literary classics.

I have told my children stories and read them books since their earliest days. When the older two were babies, I would plop them into their reclined, bouncing baby seats and position myself between the two, a pile of books within reach. Looking at the bright pictures in those books kept the babies quiet for good chunks of time. No matter that my back ached from sitting awkwardly, or that several years later I can still recite, from the memory of sheer repetition, every wildly colored page of the silly, rhyming tale “Giraffes Can’t Dance,” stories were comforting to us all.

We’ve moved on to other favorites, and those babies last week completed kindergarten, where their teacher read aloud each day at snack time. She started with “Charlotte’s Web,” written more than half a century ago by master storyteller E.B. White, one of my favorite writers – both for his beloved children’s classics and his skillfully composed essays.

Each day on the way home, the kids tell me what happened at school – what games they played at recess, what cool project they did in art class, what they wrote in their journals. When they started “Charlotte’s Web,” that story was added to the mix: “Mama, today in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ they went to the fair,” or, “Charlotte laid her eggs,” or, sadly, “Charlotte died.”

When the kindergarten class moved on to the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, my mother dug out the books I’d had as a child so I could reread them as the kids were hearing them in school. They loved that I was reading the same story they were. I loved revisiting a favorite from my own childhood and found it just as engaging, entertaining, and educational as it had been decades earlier during my first read of “Little House.”

The after school conversation evolved from, “Mama, today in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ they lost their dog Jack, and when then they found him Laura thought he was a wolf,” to, “Mama, did you get to the part where Pa saw the wolves?” Instead of the kids telling me what had happened, we were experiencing the story together.

My children have started to read on their own. It’s hard work, learning to read, but the reward is great. As with all good stories, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Little House on the Prairie” offer glimpses into another world – the farmyard and country fair of a half century ago and the dense forests and wide open prairie land of the frontier days. Sometimes the kids make up their own stories, from the pictures in books or the depths of their limber imaginations. When they are tired or bickering with each other, hearing stories read to them still soothes them – and me. Selecting a bedtime story is a cherished part of the day for each child.

Finding knowledge and wonder within the pages of a book is a familiar part of life for my kids, and I hope it always will be. Some of my happy memories of childhood are lazy, hazy summer days spent swinging on the hammock, book in hand, or holed up in my room on a rainy day with a stack of Nancy Drew mysteries for company and entertainment.

I still like my stories best from the paper pages of a real book, and as summer starts, I wonder what stories I’ll discover in the coming months. We’ll all begin together, my children and I, with “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” picking up where their kindergarten teacher left off, leading us into our summer reading.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the June 21, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.