A Different Kind of Summer Day

Sigh. It’s a beautiful August day outside.

The sun it out but it’s not too hot. A slight breeze dries the little bit of sweat that springs up from running around on the green grass. The pavement is warm on my sandaled feet.

I miss having summers off. Three months of ease and joy. I miss those lazy hot August days, like today, in the waning hours before school starts again. It seemed like summer would never end and Autumn was a forever away.

I miss dry Albuquerque days with powerful monsoon rainstorms in the late afternoon.

Splashing in sprinklers. Chasing lizards. Riding my bike.

Then dashing inside where the refrigerated air was like heaven on earth and sipping sun tea while watching Guiding Light with my mom and sister and often my grandmother too.

I think I had angst back then. I’m pretty sure I worried a lot. I at least got a little worked up over the latest machinations of Reva and Josh in that soap opera world.

But I had kid worries too. What would school be like? Why didn’t I have more friends? Why was my hair mousey brown and not blonde? When mom and dad talked about money problems did that mean something bad was going to happen?

I know I had a lot of angst back then, but in hindsight it seems so easy. So effortless.

What is that saying? “Youth is wasted on the young.” For me maybe not wasted but certainly not appreciated.

On this beautiful August day, I sit in my hard walled office with one glass wall and gaze out to the park across the street. Kids run and tumble and shout and scream and seem to be having a really effortlessly fun summer.

And I feel wistful.

I know kids today have their own worries and in a lot of ways it’s harder to be a kid today than it was way back when. But right now I am gazing out the window as I prepare for my next conference call where we’ll blah de blah for an hour about something that seems terribly important but really isn’t. Right now I sort of wish for a swimming pool, a soft serve ice cream cone and the time and desire to lay out on a beach towel and just soak up the sun.

For just a moment to have nothing to do and nowhere to be and nothing to worry about other than when to flip over so I don’t get sunburned.

That’s summer vacation to me.

Ah well. Back to the conference call. My boss is pinging my mobile phone and asking if I am attending.

I’m attending. In body only. The spirit is floating on a hot pink blow up mattress in the muddy waters of Ute Lake.


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This photo is not totally applicable to this post, but I went to my favorite royalty free stock photo site and put “summer” in the search box.

This was the first image that came up and it was too compelling to pass up. So there you have it.







Image by Teresa Howes and used royalty free from stock.xchng



About Author

Karen Fayeth

Comments

  • Scott

    There’s one thing I can offer, for what it’s worth…being a ‘dult means you can reminisce to your hearts’ content whenever you like…you can take all those memories and re-frame them however you wish and live them over and over again. When I was a kid there was so much uncertainty…now “childhood” is a movie that is “safe,” it has a beginning, middle and end that I can watch any time I like, no matter where I am in my present. I can literally play the sounds, smell the smells, imagine the tastes and touches and it’s as if I’m really there (only it’s much, much better in my mind than it really was, because I didn’t know then what I know now). You have a brilliantly developed imagination and that’s your E-ticket to anywhere you want to go, whenever you want to go there!

    Oh, and if none of that works, that’s why God invented tequila, just sayin’.

    :)

    • Karen Fayeth

      Scott – Ah tequila, the great equalizer.

      Perhaps I should procure a bottle of Patron and also a Slip’N’Slide and really relive childhood as an adult!

      Wahoooooie!!!!

  • Frank Conway

    Gee, Scott, all I get is the trailer produced by David Lynch, and it starts playing by itself.

    “I miss dry Albuquerque days with powerful monsoon rainstorms in the late afternoon.”

    I do too, even as they’re happening. As my friend Kevan (yes with an a) used to say. “Life sucks and then you die.”

    But at least you can turn a phrase like “I miss dry Albuquerque days with powerful monsoon rainstorms in the late afternoon.” Melancholy is too nice a word to let it go to waste. To me it’s like a warm, comfortable, familiar wrap, beautiful in its way, if expressed like that.

    • Karen Fayeth

      Frank – You are pretty darn good with a phrase yourself: “Melancholy is too nice a word to let it go to waste.”

      Brilliant!

  • Frank Conway

    I meant to ask you but forgot, do comments to old posts come to your attention? Do they sit there waiting for your biographer to discover?

    It also occurred to me that the phrase is good because it’s both sparing of any unnecessary words, and elegant.

    Like Scott said, good writing.

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