Summer, summer, summertime....

There is a scent in the air tonight, and while it is a little chilly and damp, I recognize it as the smell of summer. When I was younger, my family and I lived on a lake high on a mountain top...miles from civilization. (cue the banjo from deliverance) The winters were harsh, sometimes we would be unable to drive down our road, so we would be forced to trudge through feet of snow for half a mile before getting to our house, only to realize the oil truck also couldn't get down the road, and thus we were without heat. There were several times that our cars skidded off of slick roads, and countless playdates lost because parents did NOT want to venture the roadtrip to drop off their child. As a very young kid, the toboganning and ice skating were enough to make winter bearable, as was the warmth of christmas. But as I got older, it became more and more difficult to accept the way of life the great Northeast had to offer (Hence, the trip to ASU for college) . I longed for summers, which felt free and alive and full of hope. We would spend hours on the beach, with the peaceful sounds of kids catching newts and paddleboats splashing around the lake. I would bury my nose in a Stephen King book, and blister from sunburns that we never quite knew the dangers of, and go home blissfully at dusk to eat. As I hit my later teen years, summer was a time of friends, and parties, and reckless abandon. Sneaking a skinny dip, holding hands with the high school sweetheart under the fireworks on the 4th, driving in the Subaru with the moonroof open and the stars merely an arm's reach away.... One cannot deny that in youth, we feel invincible and unmistakeably effervescent, like a seltzer bottle shaken until it is bursts. Summer brought that out in me, and still does.
As a grown up, my summers have inevitably changed. The summers are more vicarious now, as my own kids are counting down days till school comes to an end. I am sending in checks for camp, and planning our adventure in the Adirondacks, and looking for beach cabanas for our weekend in Maine. I am perfunctorily plotting out playdates and squeezing in time for sand castle building, while my kids wait for the bliss to fall on them like fairy dust. Right now, summers mean swingsets and fireflies and soft serve at Rainbow Delights. It means itchy scratchy mosquito nights at the Drive-In, and eating watermelon in the gazebo. But in just a few short, oh so very short, years, it will mean driving lessons, and flirting with the neighbor, and slumber parties that may (or may not) be supervised by parents. It will be nights of parties that are so thrilling, they may get shivers up their backs, with bonfires that lick the blackest of July nights. It will mean shorts that are too short, and noses that are too sunkissed, and months that pass much too quickly. And then they, too, will eventually outgrow (or be told to outgrow) those immature crazy days, and jobs and school and kids and RESPONSIBILITY will change summers. But the one thing that never ever ever goes away, is the smell.
Like a drug, like a sip from that ever sought after fountain of youth, we will sniff it, snort it, inhale it till our lungs are screaming for release. Our days of warm and pulsating chaos will flash before our eyes, and we will let it go. But every once in a while, you will catch us, after the children are tucked in bed, and the bills have been paid, and the dishes scrubbed, running barefoot through the grass, enveloped in balmy midnight, with our hands wrapped around a firefly.