Summer

It's been summer for one day, and already I'm feeling behind. It's like I have a 200 item to-do list that I haven't even written yet. Maybe it comes from childhood, when summer was a brief furlough from the prison that was school, and you had to get in all the enjoyment you could before the opportunity disappeared for another nine months. Or maybe it stems from the adult-world change to that schedule, when it's hot outside but you have to work all the time anyway. In any case, summer comes with a lot of pressure.

Every year I want the summer to be extra summery. I imagine I'll eat nothing but iced coffee and homemade popsicles and produce purchased at farm stands. I vow to either get a real tan or use SPF 60 perfectly, but to avoid - this time, finally - that cheesy left-arm-only driver's tan. I want sundresses, but different ones from the sundresses I already have, and beachy hair, and pop music, but the exact right kind of pop music, and a nightly supply of refreshing cocktails. But except for the iced coffee, most of this never happens.

This year I started thinking about summer a bit early, because of all the honeysuckle. I don't know if it's a particularly good year for honeysuckle, or if I've just been spending more time outside lately. But the plants seem to be all over all of a sudden, overpowering every path with their scent-induced memories, like something from a Stanislavski textbook. I smell them and instantly recall being young, and carefully extracting that drop of sweetness from each flower, and spending whole days happily covered in sand and salt, and crossing evening roads through what seemed like curtains made of fireflies.

You can't get that back, I don't think, that kind of childhood summer of pure optimism, of pure faith that despite what all previous experience has demonstrated, this summer - and by extension next fall - will be better than the last. But you can possibly, hopefully, arrange for there to be more sundresses and cocktails.