I feel like crap. Sometimes this happens to me. It can happen at anytime, but it often happens as August, and more so late August, hits. I think the lack of structure and routines get to me, too. Dear Daughter is out of school, and we're trying to fill her days. And work does not let up. For all my talk of lemonade, ice cream, carefree days at the beach, baseball games, grilling, and gin & tonics - it does not overcome the heat, humidity, the unannounced storms (and floods), the bugs (and the bug bites), the sweat, the sun damage to my protesting fair skin, and the general malaise I get as summer drags on and on and on. And on. So by this time of year, I'm just over it. Done. Thank you very much.
Maybe I'd like summer more if I spent a long stretch in a cabin, on a lake, sitting on the porch, reading, writing, cooking, going for a swim - two, three, four times a day...to the floating dock about 100 meters offshore. And skinny dipping at night, floating on my back looking at the sea of stars above, picking out a constellation or two.
I had a summer like that. Two summers, in fact - on Lake Spitfire in the Adirondacks. Skinny dippin', constellation pickin', floatin' dock and all. I was a teenager - sixteen and seventeen years old, joining a family I used to babysit for. My teenage boyfriend and I wrote long love missives to each other lamenting the weeks apart, and making heated plans for a torrid reunion in the fall.. The memories are vivid - over twenty years later. There was no access by car - only boat, and I had access to the Boston Whaler to get from our cabins to the main dock through the channel over to Upper St. Regis. I suppose there were bugs there - but I don't remember them. I do know as summer went on, it was cool enough to light a fire in the fireplace at night. And on my late summer swims, I nearly froze my ass off - but skinny-dipped anyway - shivering - because I knew that summer nights were drawing to a close. I love swimming, and I love skinny dipping even more (and just wish there were more real opportunities to do so).
I think these were the best summers of my life. Or at least when I want to conjure up an image of peace, tranquillity, contentment - my perfect place - I think of there and then, or even There and Now.
I like spring and fall. And the early winter. I don't like summer because I don't like heat, I have sensitive skin, I have to use sunblock all over all parts of my body that are not covered with fabric to prevent skin cancer...no...I'm very happy that summer is over...I liked summer when I was a child but since the dermatologist cut my first mole, that has changed color, out of my skin, I hate sun.
ReplyDeleteYour summers sound like the summers I spent as a kid. Most of them we went, with my granny, to a cabin on a lake in the CT Berkshires. The cabin hadn't changed much since her father had bought it at the beginning of the century, but it had a great porch, a dock, and a raft just like you describe. It was surrounded by woods that were great to explore, there was a canoe to explore our lake and the one that was connected to it off to the west, and every once in a while we would go somewhere in the hills for a hike.
ReplyDeleteLater, when I was teenager, we didn't go there as often (the part of the family that had inherited the cabin began to grow and there was less time they were willing to share it), so we'd go up to Maine and spend the summer with my cousins, who had a summer house (also inherited) on an island off the coast. No lake, but you could swim in the cold, rocky ocean (I was often the only one who wanted to do that :-), play badminton (on the near-vertical hillside below the house--very challenging!), read, or walk. Sometimes one of my college-age cousins would be there for a weekend and take some of us sailing.
But I miss the cabin on the lake, coming down early in the morning to find my dad sitting and reading by the fire one needed on the chilly mornings, a cup of tea by his side. Or walk softly down the boards to the lake, still shrouded by mist, and siting listening to the quiet plops of fish catching early morning flies or the mournful honks of geese overheard, continuing their trek south.