Uh, so where did my summer go?
A C ertain Point of V iew
Could anyone explain to me how it is possibly August already? By my account, the math isn’t adding up. There is no way that summer is already on its way out. It’s only been a couple weeks, hasn’t it? It just doesn’t seem fathomable… Last summer made sense. Last summer I was busy with a ton of big life events happening right on top of each other. Last summer it was understandable that the few nice months we have a year whizzed by in the blink of an eye.
But this summer was supposed to be different. This summer, I didn’t have any of those things to plan or work on or do. Mikaela and I were settled in our jobs, our new home, and we were finally going to have some time to sit back and relax. Enjoy the sunshine, catch up on a few good books, have some friends over for a grill out or three. Just a nice few months to relax and chill.
Uh, yeah. Perhaps it was a bit naive of me to think that my summers would ever remotely return to what I remembered them being as a kid. Okay, maybe no ‘perhaps’ to it. But still, I cannot help but be surprised by how quickly June and July have passed me by.
On one hand, I suppose it makes sense. We Wisconsinites have a precious few weeks to do all of our outdoor social gatherings, and so of course many weekends will be dedicated to these. Add a trip to Omaha and the various fairs and festivals we have to cover, a couple Merchants baseball games here and there and all of a sudden pretty much every spare day is accounted for.
The few that aren’t? Well, I may not have to shovel the driveway for hours on end at the moment, but that has been replaced by tending to the numerous other outdoor maintenance chores that need doing.
Wrangling in the various gardens has been a challenge, as we had no idea what was supposed to be there and what was merely a weed in the spring when it would have been easier to pluck out the unwanted plants. I am certainly no botanist, or anything close, so the best option seemed to just be to let everything grow and see what happened. Which of course meant that when it came time to eventually take out the parts we didn’t want, it was a bit more of an adventure than it probably needed to be. Thankfully, my mom is a master weed-puller and my dad knows how to work a chainsaw without the fear of cutting a limb off, so their assistance made the job infinitely easier. Even with their help, it was still a lengthy task, not to mention the continued maintenance once the job was complete.
All of which is to say that, when one considers all of this, I suppose it is not surprising that the summer has flown by as it has. When I step back and think about everything we have done, it actually is a bit shocking that we’ve gotten so much accomplished in such a short amount of time.
On one hand, that’s probably a good thing, or at the very least not a bad problem to have. But, as is a constant issue, there never seems to be enough time to do all of the other things that I wanted to get done. The list of unread books adorning my bookshelf is still much too long and the number of times we have entertained friends for an impromptu cookout has the opposite problem. That’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes.
And it’s not quite over yet. While I am lamenting that so much of it is gone, we still have a good part of August left, and while school and sports kicking into gear will certainly add to many people’s to-do lists, mine included, the warm weather is not quite abandoning us yet. There’s still time to get all of those things done. Whether or not that actually happens… well, we will just have to see.
