Our quest for the best summer ever is drawing to a close. The days are shorter; when I wake up for a morning bike ride, it's too dark to ride. Nights at the park are shorter too, as the sun takes its leave a bit earlier every night. Autumn is nigh.
But it's been quite a summer. Camping, long dinners and drinks at friends' houses. Grilling by the lake on Father's Day. Sleepovers for the kids, lots of hard work and hard play at choir camp, careening down the water slide at the Americinn in Appleton. A nice, cold, celebratory glass of New Glarus Spotted Cow at a little restaurant in Plymouth, Wisconsin, with my choir compatriots. I could go on.
What does a kid take away from a summer like this, I wonder? Maybe some memory, later in life, of a time when life was simpler, and pleasures more intense and purely felt. A feeling of being surrounded by a loving family, I hope. Maybe some melancholy, too. Early in the summer we spent a couple of nights at the rural retreat of a family friend. As we left after the second night of camping, there was one boy who ran practically a mile down a dirt path following our car. The party was breaking up, and after two days of play he was loath to let it slip away. I thought of Chesterton: "Why dreams are different from daylight, why dead things are different from live things, why he himself is different from others, why beauty makes us restless and why even love is a spring of quarrels, why we cannot so fit into our environment as to forget it and ourselves; all these things are vaguely felt by children on long empty afternoons, or by primitive poets writing the epics and legends of the morning of the world."
What will I take away? I'm not sure. But hopefully, 40 years from now, when my body has stopped doing what I ask it to do, my eyesight is growing dim and the ringing in my ears is even louder, I'll be able to look back at all this time spent with family, and friends, and see if for what it is -- a great, an untold, an undeserved blessing.
