This is about the point in the summer that I begin thinking about the start of school.
It sounds crazy, but, for my high school daughter, it is just a month away. For my college-aged daughter, it is a little more than five weeks. After July 4, summer always feels like a freight train barreling down the tracks in the direction of fall.
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I remember being a child and thinking the same thing—summer is almost gone. In reality, especially in a place as temperate as North Carolina, we have many weeks of good weather left to enjoy before any inkling of fall creeps into our calendars.
Yet, there is something foreboding about lifting the July page on our family’s jumbo wall calendar and seeing my red Sharpie notation in August that reads: “School Starts!”
School starting is both good and bad. It is good because it puts our family back into a routine. It is bad because it puts our family back into a routine.
Gone are the laid-bad days of summer where dinner is “every man/woman for him/herself.” Gone are the impromptu sleepovers for my teenage daughter and my ongoing blessing—“Have fun!” In its place, there is a structure, an order to things, a reminder that summer is a fleeting time of year where the borders of that structure are joyfully murky.
So, this year, I’m going to try and not flip the calendar page too early. I am part of a tribe I like to call “summer people.”
Summer people prefer flip-flops to shoes, a bathing suit to a sweater, and extreme heat to snow. We do not long for the leaves to change, or to sit around a fall bonfire sipping cider. Instead, we savor the hot summer nights, delight in every day we can jump in the water, and constantly remind ourselves that if we’re lucky, the magical season will come around again …
Amanda is the mom of two, a reporter for WRAL-TV and the author of several books including some on motherhood. Find her here on Mondays.