Hi, loves. 🌿
On the shapelessness of summers
When I was young, we spent a few weeks every summer at my uncle and aunt’s house in upstate New York. It was always at the end of the summer, when I had off from gymnastics and before school was back in swing. My mother and I drove down early — my father was still working, my sister was away at camp — and settled in for a whole two weeks of country time.
The house didn’t fit all of us terribly well: technically there were only two bedrooms and an attic, so I spent most summers proudly on a futon on the floor of the hallway; my parents often ended up in the living room on a pullout; and one summer, my college boyfriend and I slept in a tent down the hill next to a little barn. There was only one bathroom. (Quite sure said boyfriend and I peed out in the wild that summer.)
There wasn’t a lot to do, but we found joy everywhere: we swam in the frigid late, ate burritos and corn on repeat, went on walks at the creek, had our one outing for pancakes in Phoenicia. I wrote letters to my friends and we always read a play of my grandfather’s aloud. My younger uncle taught me how to wash dishes with gusto by hand (by singing, “There once was a hole, in the middle of the ground…”); my older uncle wrote plays with me and played improv games. I’d go to the Grand Union and the laundromat with my mother, and sometimes she’d let me get a special summer cereal (this kind of sugar was banned from our home), and once during the trip we’d go shopping in Woodstock and I’d get to choose a single, perfect thing: a pair of earrings, a T-shirt. My older sister always came later — she was coming home from camp or a college-related trip or, later, from her real job in New York or LA or med school Chicago. Once in a while she brought a boyfriend, which fascinated me and also broke my heart.
The only thing my mother would buy me without reservation were books. At the beginning of the trip, we’d go to the Golden Notebook and I’d leave with piles and piles. I was not a big reader at the time — I was really only into moving, cartwheels were my pastime when I wasn’t at the gym — but there was no TV, often no other kids around until my sister arrived (who was no longer a kid anyway), and it was my chance to walk out of the store with new stuff that was all mine crammed into a bag.
I have no recollection of what I read during those summers I was 10 and 11 and 12, only that I did. That I could finally impress my parents with my brain and not my body and declare, “Finished!” and they’d be awed that their child who seemed to only want to bounce over the furniture and leap across any flat surface had sat for long enough to get to the end of the story.
We stopped cramming into the house the summer my sister and I shared our aunt and uncle’s bedroom with her toddler son and he screamed, TRAIN! TRAIN! TRAIN! until 3am. She brought him into bed with us and held the train catalogue in front of his face to keep him quiet and I witnessed, for the first time, the grotesque realities of middle-of-the-night mothering. We’d finally outgrown the house. Most other families would have declared it too cramped decades earlier (see: sleeping on the floor of the hallway), but it hadn’t occurred to us to not be together. This was just the kind of family we were, we are.
Still, we kept going. In fact, we went — by my calculations — straight for 24 years, until the summer my husband and I got married, in the very same house a few miles away that my parents had begun renting when the brood had expanded beyond the confines of the house in Olivebridge.
You cannot call us unsentimental.
Summers more recently have looked different. It’s now been 36 years since that first summer we all landed at my aunt and uncle’s front steps, and we’ve scattered — my husband and I went to Munich and Vienna and then to LA, my sister’s family expanded then moved west, too, so we gathered in Montreal instead, where more people could sleep in actual beds. Then my parents sold the house and Covid hit and these family gatherings dissolved entirely. They’ve been replaced by smaller affairs — a pair of us go to New York; our threesome heads to Montreal or to my sister’s. It doesn’t feel the same. The ritual was the thing.
I’ve been thinking about the shape of things lately, the shape of summers, how much they need us to exert some force over them. How badly we want the freedom, and how constructed that freedom often is.
When we decided to come back to Cambridge this summer, it was, in part, to let go of any shape, to release ourselves from the culture of summer camp and dance classes and organized playdates and schlepping here and there and being tethered to some sort of firm routine. I told people the kid was going to have a free-range summer, the kind we had back in the 80s (I most certainly did not have this, I went to day camp until I left for sleep-away camp).
With The Anxious Generation and all its attending panic taking over an entire generation (mine, especially those of us whose kids are on the cusp of getting phones), we wanted the opposite: we wanted the kid to have freedom of movement, of play, with minimal screens; we wanted her to roam unattended and unafraid, something one can actually do in a small city like Cambridge. We pictured her on her bike, gone for hours, with friends or without, exploring.
I will say that we’ve been pulling it off — sort of. She’s taken off on her bike without me many times now, and while this might feel like a small thing to some, when you live in LA, this is everything. “You told me I could go into town alone when I wanted to get away from you!” she yelled at me on the first day I actually let her go off on her own. We made sure she knew where to lock her bike, where to find Claire’s (her favourite store), how to get back.
But our shapeless days actually involve quite a bit of mental load for me: What should we do tomorrow? is the question she is absolutely sick of me asking but one that actually needs to be asked on a loop. Her father is away for a few weeks. Old friends we’ve come back to see are available some days but not all. There are only so many times you can go to Claire’s (it turns out it’s a lot of times). Each day does demand things of us.
Perhaps (obviously?) this is part of what all those books were about when I was little. The books were of course a way to force me to use my brain, to keep me occupied absent any other children or scheduled activities, but they were also a way to make something of the time. To do nothing — but actually not be doing nothing at all.
In an effort to bulk up the reading, she and I have started a reading competition — entirely not my style, my husband pointed out when I showed him the chart glued to the fridge over Facetime. The winner gets…something. (I get nothing.) She is already winning (thanks to Lottie Brooks), even though I’ve been on a streak of Elin Hildebrand novels that go down easy, and avoiding the harder books I packed along.
What am I trying to say? In spite of the need to build a shape to the days, I’m trying, as hard as I can, to release myself from the pressure of making something of every moment. While we are technically “on holiday,” as the Brits say, we are also not new here, we aren’t exactly tourists. We know where to get groceries and the good pizza and the very best ice cream (also here). We’ve punted and we’ve walked on windy roads and we’ve gone to concerts and we’ve biked and we’ve sat by the river. There’s more to discover (always!) but it’s no longer entirely new.
Still, I’ve been noticing in the quieter moments — the kid has a friend over, I’m letting her watch TV on her own — an inability on my part to fully relax. I find myself texting friends: Am I the worst mother if I let her watch TV while we are here??? Or beating myself up for not using the two hours I have supervising drowning by the pool in scorching heat to move my novel along. I’m amazed by all the ways I let myself feel inadequate.
What are summers for, I end up asking myself? It’s an honest question, not one I write with any sarcasm or irony. It’s a true question. Maybe it is for reading as many novels as we can, maybe it is for lazing around on a blanket, or watching High School Musical: The Series every night, snuggled in bed together. Maybe shape isn’t the thing. Maybe there’s something to leaning into the shapelessness of it all and not panicking. Letting our idea of time — of productivity, of worth, of doing itself — shift.
Sending love,
Abs xo