In Praise of the Low-Key Summer

In Praise of the Low-Key Summer. My fomo peaks this time of year, as the…

photo by Jessica Ruscello

My fomo peaks this time of year, as the days get long and school lets out. I’ve always felt pressure to live my life during June, July and August like a Country Time Lemonade commercial, despite the fact that I don’t live in the country or have a lemon tree or particularly like jumping into water the bottom of which I can’t see, and despite the fact that I grouse at such naked corporate appeals to our communal nostalgia, and despite the fact that the little nitpicky fact-finder in my brain knows that summer, like every other season, has historically been a time of hard work for most people on the planet, not sepia-toned leisure. (The nitpicky fact-finder was pretty bummed to learn that the story about summer vacation being so kids could farm isn’t quite true…)

Being a parent has intensified the pressure of summer fomo — now I’m responsible not only for my own perfect summer, but my kid’s?

Well, no more. Just as I embrace the idea of the “good enough” mother, I am embracing the idea of the “good enough” summer. Rather than make a list of dozens of activities, trips, recipes, and games I have to organize, purchase or make, and execute so that my family can have a “good” summer, I’m slowing it way, way down… Here, if you care to see, is my summer-goals list of three.

1. Bake a cake about once a week. Before you say too ambitious!, note that the word “about” is doing a lot of work and that sentence. And these are single-layer cakes, and frosting is optional if not discouraged, and I genuinely like baking, and I really like having a cake under a clear glass cloche on the counter that my daughter or I can cut a slice from whenever we fancy. Just passing a cake in the kitchen gives me a flicker of the same excitement as knowing you have a fun trip on the horizon. If I’ve learned anything in these forty-odd years of life it’s that anticipation is as least as good as fulfillment. Moreover, this project will allow me to convert my copy of Odette Williams’ Simple Cake cookbook from an aspirational purchase (maybe someday I’ll bake cakes all the time!) to a well-used and well-loved one.

2. Be outside more than I am in the winter. Not whenever possible, not all day. Just keep the blue sky and warm air in mind, and when it doesn’t seem annoying (like when I’d just rather eat at the dining room table or read on the couch), go outside. For five minutes or five hours — this isn’t a time thing. Snip a few flowers. Be barefoot on the crabgrass. Look up — last night, to my delight, I happened to be smack-dab right underneath Big Dipper — and imagine an ancestor using the stars to head North. Or look up and think nothing at all. This is a meandering journey with no destination. It’s a gentle, friendly reminder to soak up pleasant weather, invite the sunlight into my lungs and skin and bones, witness how the slow, sunlit evenings remind me that this, right here, is heaven.

Bonus: where I lead, my kid will follow. If I’m watering the garden, it’s not long before she’s got her blue tin watering can in hand. If I’m reading on the porch, she’ll wander out with a book of her own.

3. And finally, the piece de resistance: Make a lot of s’mores. (Explanation follows.)

So, I’m a people person — with a whiff of post-pandemic social anxiety. I’m energized by being around friends and family — but I’m still a little rusty. Nevertheless, I believe gathering is about as essential to our short- and long-term wellbeing as food and water, and I should no longer leave it so flagrantly to chance.

“Intentionally gathering” can sound…kind of extravagant or self-serious. A bit of me rolls my eyes when I think of “gathering together.” But the reality is that to purposefully seek out and create communion with one another honors a common, undeniable desire in us that is, ultimately, a vital affirmation of our livingness. Poet and essayist Susan Griffin is writing about social justice movements in this quote, but the broader point about convening ourselves is terrific:

The wish for communion exists in the body. It is not for strategic reasons alone that gathering together has been at the heart of every movement for social change. These meetings were in themselves the realizations of a desire that is at the core of human imaginings, the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make our survival a shared effort, to experience a palpable reverence in our connections with each other and the earth that sustains us.

In other words, when we get together, the gatherings themselves are a realization of the change we want to see in the world. Who knew it could be so simple. I’m not saying it’s going to solve the world’s ills, but I’m not saying it won’t either.

With all this in mind, last week I did three things:

First, I bought a little propane fire pit.

Then, I purchased several dozen fair-trade chocolate bars, a towering stack of hippie-dippie whole-grain graham crackers, and some very puffy armfuls of corn-syrup-free-and-vegan marshmallows. Kind of like a Costco run but at the local health food store, and a modest, hopefully-not-obnoxious upgrade from the childhood recipe.

And then (drumroll)I told neighborhood friends that every summer Sunday between 7 and 8 in the evening they are welcome to come on over and make s’mores. I told them I’ll be there with folding chairs and fixings (and a big pot of water because I’m an anxious planner and you never know), and they’re welcome to join, they’re invited to join, to come as they are, to eat and leave or eat and linger, to bask in the primal joy of gazing at a fire, and to enjoy a balmy (or foggy) night with company in our little neck of the global woods.

Et voilà! That’s my summer, ya’ll. Cake, fresh air, neighborhood folks. Easy does it all the way through. May you enjoy your summer, easily, too.