Aging Capriciously

Well, I suppose I should have been blogging about summer two days ago.  I could make the excuse that it is better late than never, but in truth, I am doing everything much slower these days.  That goes for summer to.  We have lots to do this summer with selling our Wisconsin house and moving permanently down to Arizona.  Don’t know what permanently means, but for now it means leaving many old memories behind and embarking on new memories.  We are going to the “land of endless summer” for what just may be the rest of our lives.  Who knows.

“Summertime, when the living is easy.” That line from the musical “Porgy and Bess” by G. Gershwin seems to always resonate in my mind when the warm breezes start blowing the cold weather away in Wisconsin.  We all love summer.  For many of us, it is a time of vacations and connotations of freedom from school and work.  However, why does the song say the living is easy?  I think it is because summer seems to bring that association to mind despite the fact that it is not now nor probably ever was easy.  Nevertheless, we think of the lushness of fresh fruit, vegetables, the farmers market and long days and nights.  It does not matter that we may work all summer, the dream is still there of “easy living.”

As we get older, most of us will think back to our childhoods with fond summer memories of doing nothing but kicking rocks, jumping rope, fishing, swimming off of the old bridge, camping with our friends or weekends at the cabin with our family. Perhaps these are more traditional Midwest memories but no matter where you live, you will have your own memories associated with summer time.  All over the world, people are in vacation mode during the summertime.  Maybe you will spend your summer traveling to exotic destinations or simply taking a short trip to visit relatives.  Summer brings a longing for what we want life to have in store for us as we age.  Summer is a time of psychological retirement years before any of us will ever retire.

What are your best summer memories?  What did you once do each summer that is now simply a memory?  What summer traditions do you still celebrate?  What do you hope your future summers will have in store for you?  Are you living your dreams now or waiting?

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”  — Henry James

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”  ― John Lubbock

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don’t, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”  ― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures