Summer
And just like that, it’s summer.
This morning I splurged—yes, splurged—on a lemon Perrier, buffed a little boo-boo off of the ol’ Dutchi (which was ridden to fetch the aforementioned, ludicrously unnecessary mineral water), consumed two breakfasts consisting mainly of berries, and painted my sad, white little toes a happy shade of what can only be described as “Disco Orange.” Though I was aiming for something a little more like a “Poppy” or a “Sherbet”, far worse things have happened to my bare feet. …
Summer to me always began with the ceremonious opening of the public pool on Memorial Day. Growing up in Colorado, this did not necessarily make good sense, as snow could very well fall into June, ruining all our best laid plans for cut-offs and watermelon. But it was tradition, all the same. The last weekend of May, the cool upper classmen in their red two-pieces and mysteriously pre-browned legs, would climb up to their stations, watch over the crowd of pasty vassals (a la Wendy Peffercorn) and blow their whistles, decreeing the end of school and the beginning of lazy freedom.
It mattered not that my sister and I, awkwardly sheltered little ankle-biters that we were, had to emerge from the pool every hour, on the hour, to reapply the highest SPF possible over every inch of what little skin was allowed to show. Our father, in a flurry of concern surrounding a combination of modesty and the possibility of skin cancer, lovingly required us to don knee-length t-shirts over our tank-suits. (I remember once being allowed to swim with no t-shirt on… at my 11th birthday pool party. I was also the proud recipient of my first compact disc, Everybody Else is Doing it so Why Can’t We? It was a good day.)
The point being that, we were most assuredly un-cool. But! It wasSummer!
Now that I’m grown and wearing the teeny tiniest bikini I darn-well please*, I’m in a place where the signs of summer are… blurred. This is symbolic on a myriad of sentimental levels, best to be left for a much less public diary. But still—California, with its eternal stretch of brown sunshine and stable range of temperature, has me occasionally yearning for that clear-cut indicator that happy days are here again.
That is, until I decided to blow the whistle myself. Today, it is summer, folks. The sun is shining, the bugs are biting, and I’m going to make a strawberry pie.
*Which is, to be honest, not very teeny-tiny at all. But I do not wear a t-shirt! No, sir! Just a hat. And SPF 30. And sometimes a sarong over my shoulders.
