Summer Days

 

 

Hello sweaty days and cold-showers before bed.  Hello daily garden chores and overgrown weeds that are birthed and grown towering overnight.  Hello food on the grill (a new one since I accidentally blew up our old one a few weeks ago.  We got it when we were first married 15 years ago so it didn't owe us anything but...what a way to go.) and daily pokes of my head into the zucchini and cucumber plants to see when those babies will be big enough to pluck.  (I CAN'T WAIT!)  Hello summer thunderstorms and the rainbows that come afterward. Hello roses and bumbles, flittering along doing their daily harvesting duties.  Hello staking tomatoes and washing hands- soap turning tomato hands magically florescent yellow.  Hello basil that needs pinching and dill flowers that need frozen and the case of celery that needs to be dehydrated before it is wasted.  Hello dinner on the porch and breakfasts too and daily yearnings from all children "May we go to the lake?  I wiiisssshhhh we could go to the lake to swimmmmmm....." (which have been ignored thus far).  Hello freezy pops after long weeding sessions and fresh herbs in my cooking.

Goodbye standardized testing and portfolios and notary work and stress and deadlines.  Ugh.  And Good riddance.

I've been trying to be a 'yes' kind of Mama this summer.  So I say 'yes' to sandy beach parks and yes to tea parties in woods and yes to homemade mint oreos (when I *know* I am going to eat them and SHOULDN'T!!!)and yes to keeping a baby opossum for a pet.  (Though "Opi" was only with us for a day...in the morning Judah found him dead.  He had a broken leg...and maybe he had been abandoned longer than when we first found him?)

The calendar is chock full of 'yes' scribbled in squares every single week of this summer and around the edges of our days I must fit the 'first we musts' too.   And of course things are pushed by the wayside too.  There are hairballs on the side of my tub that have been there for weeks and the shower curtain liner is bright orange with rust.  I cleaned under the couches last night and in the corner of the living room and literally filled up the entire dining room table with misplaced, long forgotten junk.  (I would have been wise just to chuck it all in the garbage.)  There is still a rubbermaid container full of bedding in my mudroom that hasn't been taken back up the cubby yet from our vacation...oh, in the beginning of June.  It took me four days to fold several loads of laundry that laid strewn in baskets in the living room.

It's a delicate balance, isn't it?  Clean homes are important.  Tidyness feels really, really good.  For the five seconds it stays that way anyway.   Days are filled with certain need-to-do's. Children need to be fed three times a day.  And, silly things like clothing to wear.  Animals need care, gardens need care, dishes need to be cleaned in order to be dirtied again.   But there is real value in occasionally setting aside all the niceties and seeming necessities to just be free.  Free to be open to adventures and fun.

So far so good.  Things seem to be balancing themselves out alright.  We'll see how long we can keep it up before everything just implodes.  ;-)