I scrubbed the summer off our house.
Sandy towels washed and stored away next to swimsuits that probably won’t fit next year, but I’ll keep anyway.
Baseball uniforms taking too much space in drawers finally evacuated to higher ground.
Grime off the bathrooms neglected, victims of too many ineffective, five-minute cleanings.
The lingering stacks of papers from the last school year finally sorted and stored away.
All to the tune of a much neglected trombone.
I shed my summer paraphernalia like the box of stuff collected after a break-up. Out of sight, out of mind.
And just like that, it was over.
This morning I put on boots instead of sandals.
I sat down and wrote out a schedule.
I squeezed my daily cocktail hour/daily ice cream ass into a pair of jeans.
I filled the calendar with pot lucks and festivals and back to school night.
I scheduled exercise. A word I’ve ignored since June.
I set out on a walk with a rediscovered discipline. Let’s get this heart rate up and save these bones from deterioration.
It was on this walk where the air still felt like summer, but the light felt more like fall, that I remembered.
Every year I have this same conversation with myself – it’s September. Time to buckle down.
In summer, time seems expansive. Every day a wide gulf that must be crossed. How will we fill the hours? There’s a leniency. A willingness to flow wherever the day takes you.
But fall. In fall time contracts. It becomes less about how will you fill your days and more about how much you can cram into a single day. How efficiently and smartly can you stack everything that needs to get done in perfectly balanced towers. Every day is a series of stepping stones and you’re jumping from one to the next with unexplainable urgency but urgency nonetheless. And no breaks aloud!
In this squeeze. This quickening. We lose the pause. The beats between things.
We trade pause in for efficiency. And productivity. And goals. And management. Ever pushing forward.
This is why we miss summer.
It’s where we want to be. Where we’re our best, our most selfiest self, when we have time to opt out of frantic. When we have space to just be.
I tried to scrub summer away. But now I see that I need that wiggle room for things to unfold.
I need to ease off the schedules and the planning and the moving from thing to thing at warp speed.
I need to stop and listen, watch, and breath. All the things that connect me to my life.
This morning on my way to work I noticed that there’s still sand in my cup holder. I’m going to leave it there.
I need the reminder to hold on to the pace of summer where I can.
And if you want, you can too.
When Kaly doesn’t have her nose in a book, she wrangles and referees two elementary age boys and blogs about her humorous efforts to lead a mindful, connected life. She’s the author of Good Move: Strategy and Advice for Your Family’s Relocation, a book about the craziness of moving with kids. Her writing has been featured on sites such as Mamalode, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Scary Mommy to name a few. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Leave a Reply