My Lost Summer?

I can feel it now just as I felt it last night, late, and as I felt it this morning, early. I feel it then as I feel it now as it felt it before, as I certainly will, unfortunately, feel it again. The summer is slipping through my busy little hands. I didn’t want it to be this way, this summer. I wanted it to be like last summer, where my summer was everything and nothing all at the same time. It was summer, it wasn’t something I had to strive for or schedule, it just was. That was a great summer, but this one feels different. It feels like it’s almost over and yet the calendar says it has barely even started. It is a young summer, but to me it feels like it’s nearly gone. I do not like how that feels.

But there are things to do and people to meet, appointments to satisfy and people to please. There is much going on this young summer, maybe too much. Lots of this angst I feel today is because of a personal move. I sold my house and I must vacate it sometime during the next 9 days. This is not easy with a family, particularly when in search of a rental in the heart of a vacation destination’s supposed summer. This is stress, and it is not stress of the variety that will go away if just ignored. It gets worse if ignored, festering and growing and stretching from today closer to my deadline. This is making my summer difficult.

Work, that’s not something that can be ignored too often. I must jump when asked to jump, and in the moments when no one is asking anything of me I must move and paint and finish a house that will belong to someone else in not so many days from today. Those times when someone, somewhere, isn’t asking me to jump are few and far between, much fewer and much farther than they have ever been in my life. Today, I might find time to do some work on the house. Or, more likely, I will find time to do that work and them someone else will find me and ask that the time be theirs. This is fine and this is welcome, but this is not what my summer wants to look like.

My summer wants to grow old slowly. It wants to bloom in June and then linger through July and August and September. And then, once I think it’s gone, it wants to come back for a while in October. This is what summer wants to do, and this is what I want to do, but the house and the move and the painting and the sweeping… Those are not want to do items, those are must do items. The time when the want gives way to the must is something we all experience, but must my want turn to must in the middle of a Lake Geneva summer? I suppose.

So today, this glorious 82 degree day where not a cloud can be spotted in the skies over Geneva Lake, today will be another day of summer perfection that will find me anywhere but where I want to be. I’ll be where I must be, here and there, mostly everywhere, with the phone and the computer and my elbows resting on this desk while I write first this, then that, and finally some other things that must be done. And later, when the blue fades and the light dims and the water turns flat, I might be driving a borrowed pick up truck down a bouncy road praying that the clumsily stacked furniture doesn’t find its way onto the street. I’ll think of the lake, of the boat, of that sky and of that green shoreline, and then I’ll wonder why that one rope is dragging on the street and question whether there were two end tables on the back of the trailer where I will only see one.

This weekend, enjoy the lake. I’ll be moving and working and moving and then working. I’ll be at the South Shore Club for an open house from 1-3 pm Saturday, and if you notice any smudges on my clothes or a strained look in my eye, just know that these are the symptoms of the musts winning over the wants. See you at the lake.