Reclaiming my summer vacation

Summer vacations are really different now from when I was a kid. What I mostly remember about childhood summer vacations was days spent hanging out at the local swimming pool getting very tan (for which I am now paying with deep anxiety about melanoma), afternoon visits to the sports and crafts program at the local elementary school, trips to the bookmobile to stock up on summer reading, 2-week family camping trips spent alternately sightseeing and fighting with my sisters, and countless games of “kick the can” and “Red Rover” with other neighborhood kids. Oh yeah, and hanging out on the fringes of the boys’ pick-up baseball games, hoping to be invited to play. (Which I was—as catcher. Seems they had no mask. Anything to get to play.)

By contrast, my partner’s grandson, who is visiting for a month during his summer vacation, has his days filled with organized biking and skateboarding camps, a trip to Disney World … and maybe a few days of relative boredom, hanging out with the grandparents. I know this is now standard—kids go to camps for everything from make-up and fashion to computer technology, from gymnastics to science. This is good. Lots of research has shown that kids who do these activities retain last year’s learning better and come back to school more prepared than kids who don’t get to do them. But it’s another reminder of how the world keeps changing.

Last year at the end of the summer, a friend asked me how my summer had been. I was stumped for a minute, until I realized that summer was indeed over, and I hadn’t noticed it. Summer had been pretty much like any other season: I was busy with this and that, and the this’s and that’s didn’t change much from one month to the next. So I mumbled something inane and then started thinking about this situation I had created for myself. How many more summers do I have, I asked myself, and how many will I let slip by without noticing them? I live in Colorado, for Pete’s sake! What am I doing frittering away the summers indoors, doing the same things I can do in January? On the spot, I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that with this summer. So that has been my goal: to make summer different from every other season this year.

My “project” for the summer turns out to be more difficult to achieve than I first thought. As it happens, I have very few days with enough uncommitted time for me to actually go somewhere and do something summerish, something that’s different from the regular walks in the regular places. So, to make sure that I don’t have the same sort of mumbling moment come fall, I have proclaimed Wednesday my do-or-die do something! day. Declaring last Wednesday the start of my project, I took a wonderful walk on the Mesa Trail, camera phone in hand, and was treated to a profusion of early summer wildflowers (and some significant dark clouds and not-too-distant lightening). 


So here they are, the first souvenirs of my summer vacation.

           

Nice beginning, eh?