Summer dreaming
It was an email from my friend Anna that got my wheels turning.
“I can’t wait for summer,” she wrote. “I’m dying to get in my car and drive for weeks and weeks, to head down through the south and go all the way west; then north, up the coast. See Monterey, the big Sequoias, on up to Seattle to my dear friends, then east to see Yosemite, Montana, Colorado. Keep going, to see my brother in Minnesota, family in Michigan, on up to Maine. Keep going north to visit where Anne of Green Gables lives. And upon heading south, stop in New York, then in Philly to see some old friends, and then home. Just in time for school to start in September.
“Your turn. What’s your dream summer?”
I began—and abandoned—my response several times. What’s your dream summer? Such a simple question, but it caused me to realize it’s something I have trouble imagining at this stage of my life.
I can look at a strange pairing of words and imagine a story, see a scribbling on paper and see the creature it could become. I can look at ultrasounds and see babies, look at bare walls and see shelving and wainscoting and windows. I can see the forest for the trees, find needles in haystacks, and track down that squirrelly Waldo wherever he hides.
But a dream summer escapes me.
Such a thing brings to mind frivolity and spare time. Lots of spare time. We’re not quite halfway through the year and my vacation days are more than half spent. A day here for painting, a day there for moving.
And then, of course, there’s that whole money thing. Dream summers need funding. My sources of funding have been quite thoroughly tapped.
Who can fathom what a dream summer might be when they’re surrounded by boxes needing unpacked, walls needing painted, a yard needing tended? I’ll tell you who: my not-so-little girl.
“But I want to go to the beach with you,” she said, her warm hand on my arm.
“And I want to go, too,” I said. “But Grammy and PopPop are going to take you this year.”
“They took me last year,” she said.
A different sort of vacation inhibitor had been going on then, that being a diseased gall bladder that had to come out.
“Can’t we just go for a weekend?” Celeste asked. “We could drive down and right back. Just stay one night.”
I glanced away, trying to avoid a direct hit from her most practiced sad look.
“You’re so much fun at the beach,” she said.
I remembered the last time she and I went to the ocean, how we spent hours digging trenches in the sand that eventually turned into moats for elaborate castles, how we constructed a huge mermaid from an assortment of strange things that had washed up on the shore after a storm.
She’ll soon be ten. How much longer is she going to want to play in the sand? How much longer is she going to want to go to the beach with her mom instead of one of her friends?
And just like that, her dream summer has become my dream, too.
