One Place News
Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month. After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall. So does the grand, semi-malevolent intelligence that organizes American consumption: By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes. As I stroll through the aisles, I gaze wistfully at candy corn while the frosty supermarket air cools the sweat I worked up walking to the store beneath the blazing sun. Late September can’t arrive soon enough.
This summer has been especially hot, worse than most years. Heat waves killed at least 14,000 people in Europe; parts of France recorded 110-degree temperatures in June. Wildfires raged across North America, torching more than 4.5 million acres in Canada and parts of the United States, and forcing 60,000 people to evacuate their homes. The Canadian fires sent heavy smoke billowing over the Northeast, coloring the sky, contaminating the air, and forcing all activities indoors. The warming climate has brought too many ticks and a 10 to 15 percent rise in mosquitoes, along with raised red welts and transmitted viruses. All of this was on my mind as I slathered my children with insect repellent and sunscreen before sending them off to local playgrounds half-consumed by green overgrowth, poison ivy lurking among the leaves. Still, no amount of well-intended prophylaxis stands a chance against little hands and streams of sweat.
The season comes with a chaotic flurry of activity as the last school bell gives way to day camps, sleepaway camps, and hastily cobbled-together child care spread out, with luck, among family and friends—unwieldy arrangements that cost the average parent thousands of dollars a year. My two daughters arrive home from day camp hours before the workday is done, with dirt on their knees and Popsicle sticks between their teeth. I scramble to squeeze in snacks and entertainment between sentences: peanut-butter-and-jelly crackers here, a paint-by-number kit there, both kids as bored as I am busy. The front yard is apparently too flat to supply sufficient fun on the Slip ’N Slide, though my daughters still scoot valiantly on it when the afternoon grows too monotonous. I hose the grass off their feet and lay down towels before they come back inside, then stay up late doing dishes and laundry after they go to bed.
Another item of business: Both children have summer birthdays, and the pressure of whipping up summertime birthday parties can be enormous. Convening dozens of children during vacation season takes some wrangling. This year, I packed 26 piping bags of icing in a rainbow of pastel colors and made tiny cakes for one daughter and her friends to decorate while seated at long folding tables on the back patio. I also lugged a helium tank and bags of banners, tablecloths, hats, and balloons to the ice-skating rink, and nervously prayed that enough kids would show up to satisfy my other daughter. It all transpired smoothly in the end, and then I found myself with cake crumbs on my shorts and a 10-year-old and 7-year-old, wondering where the time had gone. Summer drags on but then feels fleeting. It’s hard not to experience a certain nostalgia for the moments as they pass.
Still, one works up a sweat managing the hours, such that it comes as something of a relief when the kids abscond to sleepaway camp for a couple of weeks, or to the beach with Grandma and Grandpa for a little while. The house is clean and quiet, and the work gets done. I comb through their old clothes, folding the old ones into donation bags to make room for back-to-school outfits that are one or two sizes larger than last year’s.
[Russell Shaw: The new parent trap]
But there are still a few weeks of summer left when they come home, and though there are dishes in the sink, mud tracks on the floor, and deadlines to meet, I join them on their adventures. We sail across the New York Harbor by ferry to Governors Island, a kids’ oasis where the fresh waters of the Hudson River stream into the salty Atlantic Ocean. There are food trucks, ice-cream stands, enormous slides, and a massive junkyard playground where kids can splatter paint across scrap wood and mount precariously assembled tire forts. It is hot—searing hot—but what I see when I squint through the sweat is resplendent, kids climbing the structures of their own worlds. My two daughters are golden-skinned, with sun-bleached braids; their fine, downy body hair catches the light, lending them an ethereal glow. They look like young gods in the summertime of their lives. This season is their season. The junkyard play feels a little dangerous, but it’s their beauty, not their vulnerability, that transfixes me. When night comes, I help them ignite leftover sparklers, which illuminate their faces with silvery starlight.
Fall arrives like a fever breaking. Mayhem gives way to order, and adventures give way to routines. A cool calmness presides over suburbia. And as I heave heavy pumpkins into my cart at Costco, I know that I will soon get what I have eagerly anticipated: darkness and quiet, discipline and fruitful maturity. I will clock out of work for the day just as the children arrive home from school, hang their backpacks by the door, and huddle around the kitchen table. They will have spent their day learning new skills and new social norms, developing their friendships and knowledge of the world. All of this will change them, subtly but certainly. At these ages, they are constantly being reborn. They still need me to help them with their homework, and they still need me to serve them dinner as the evening proceeds. But they will need me less than they did last year, and next year even less. And as I watch them diligently spell out answers on their worksheets, I will wish that summer had lasted forever.
