Summer Summer Summertime

To paraphrase Mary Oliver: What is it you plan to do with (the rest of) this one wild and precious season? An open thread...

New York. Children escape the heat of the East Side by using fire hydrant as a shower bath. Photographer Roger Smith. June, 1943. Via Getty Images.

Readers,

Each year as we arrive at mid-July, I begin to panic: Summer is passing too quickly! It’s always been my favorite season. I feel the most like a kid this time of year, even at 57, and I never want it to end. But alas, it always does, and too soon. I have this image in my mind of the calendar being tilted beginning in late June, causing all the summer dates slide off in rapid succession. Year in and year out I think, s-l-o-w i-t d-o-w-n…

The only antidote I can conjure is making more time for summer fun—more weekend get-aways, more swimming in pools and lakes and the ocean, more evenings around an outdoor fire, more dinners on porches, more outdoor showers. More peaches and plums and berries and sweet corn and melon and soft serve and steamers and tomatoes. None of this warps time back in my favor, and it doesn’t make the dreaded winters shorter. But at least I’m not wasting my favorite time of year.

From last summer: Oldster magically turned youngster at Boice’s Milkhouse in Kingston, NY. (Get your own Oldster tee/)

How are you making the most of this summer? What are some of your favorite summer traditions? Places to go away? Things to do? Foods to eat? Do you, like me, become a kid again in summer?

Me, I’m taking every opportunity to enjoy summer, ‘23—to really savor it. I’m still in a pandemic-induced funk, trying to nudge my life back into some recognizable form, so it feels like a slightly more desperate endeavor than usual.

To that end, this year Brian and I joined a chill, low-frills pool so we have a place to dunk in the heat and humidity, and to socialize. Last weekend we rented a house on a lake near Monticello, reading books on the dock, and idly floating around on children’s blow-up tubes we picked up at Walmart. (Unfortunately there was too much long sea grass and for swimming to be comfortable.)

Early ‘70s summer Sari—who I revert to from late June through mid-September.

Once a week or so, I insist on going around the corner to Boice’s Milkhouse for vanilla soft serve with peanut butter hard shell, or taking a ride to Fortunes Ice Cream in Tivoli , or Alleyway in Saugerties, or Nancy’s Artisanal Creamery in Bearsville. When I visit my family on Long Island, I’ll drag everyone to Artie’s in Island Park for steamers and lobster. (I guess in a way I’m trying to eat summer, whole.)

I have a distinct memory of falling in love with summer as a small child. I must have been 4 or 5. Early one morning I wandered alone into a neighbor’s yard (this is how free-range Gen X kids were in the late 60s and early 70s!) and took note of how pleased I was by everything: how warm it was, how green the grass, how lemony-yellow the sun hanging in the clear, blue sky. It was an idyllic childhood moment I’ll never forget.

Hooray for volunteer peaches now growing in our backyard!

My parents were school teachers, so when I was small, I lived under the misapprehension that everyone in the world had July and August off. I was terribly disillusioned when I became an adult and entered the working world, and realized I’d had it all wrong. These days I’m a freelancer constantly hustling, regardless of the season. But whenever I can manage it, I take breaks and steal little slices of summer.

Now I want to hear about how you all are enjoying and savoring summer. Tell me in the comments…

Have a great weekend. Get out into the sunshine, if you can. Otherwise you might blink and find the leaves are burnt orange and falling.

-Sari