We could be forgiven if we looked outside our windows and forgot what time of year it was. If we couldn’t discern late April from mid November, or mid November from mid March, someone would likely forgive us for our seasonal indifference. There’s really no matter, as long as our lives are spent on this creaky wheel, alternating sips from the water dispenser and fighting over the food dish, wondering why we must keep running without ever getting anywhere. For those people, this seasonal ambivalence is expected. They have nothing else. They have summer, spring, winter, and fall, in no particular order. They’re all the same, so on this late April day that feels to me more like the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, those people are too busy spinning that wheel to care about anything else.
Those people are lame. We are not those people. We are smart, we are stylish, and we’re here because we understand that 32 days is not a lot of time, no matter how far away summer looks through these April clouds. The mistake of watching the weather to determine the date can be fatal. I see market activity today that proves there are buyers who are keenly aware of the lengthening days. These are buyers who are intent to live this summer differently than the last summer, or differently than a lifetime of their past summers. These are buyers who know that there is redemption in that Friday that falls just 4 weeks from this next one. But for each of these buyers there are four more who are sitting at home, looking forward solely to this Saturday night where they’ll go out for prime rib. Prime rib! Boring.
There are things we must do today. While others toil to put in the piers, and others still work on boat engines to tune and refine them and make them ready for our Friday in late May, there are still things we must do. If we own a vacation home at the lake, we must get up to prepare it for summer. We cannot do this preparation over Memorial Day weekend. The thought is a romantic one- placing the American flag out on the front porch, shaking out the rugs, washing the sheets that filled with dust over the long, unrepentant winter, sweeping the porch floor to rid it of bugs that didn’t make it out in time to avoid the freeze. We could do this over Memorial Day weekend but to do so is to waste the month of May, and I prefer to waste as little time as possible.
If we own a house, it’s this weekend that we must prepare it for the summer. We must strip the old line off our fishing poles, and wind new line on. If we have dogs, or, to be fair, cats, assuming some people still have cats, then we have to lock them in another room while we spool the reels or they’ll play with the string and it isn’t good for animals to play with fishing string. If the PSA’s from my youth are true, aquatic species of all sorts should also not play with the plastic loops that old 6 packs of refreshments together, either. So we strip and load the reels, and we oil the gears, and we buy some new lures. Why do we do this? We do this because we’re getting ready for summer, remember?
If we have a house already, we get to do these things. If we don’t have a house here yet, then we just sit at home and stare at the wall, contemplating which water park we’ll go to for one or two days in July, or worse yet, contemplating which week we’ll spend on our summer vacation. Summer vacations that last a week or two are for rookies. For those who spin and toil and never find rest. Summer isn’t a vacation, it’s a mood, a feeling, it’s a four month vacation annoyingly spoiled for five days at a time by work. Summer is a lot of things, but it is not patient. Don’t trust the forecast, trust the calendar. It’ll be here in 32 days, no matter if that doesn’t seem possible through these scattered flurries.