Summertime Sadness

At work, we’ve recently added a recurring agenda item to my department’s twice-monthly meetings: two people debating dumb shit they feel extremely strongly about. We call it Hill to Die On.

At a time where many of life’s largest questions loom menacing and intractable, there’s some comfort in these low stakes hot takes, which include: Would you rather be invisible or able to time travel? What’s better, baths or showers? And which season is superior: winter or summer?

In the case of seasonal superiority, a consensus quickly emerged among my coworkers: summer’s where it’s at. Summer, after all, has water going for it. It has sun. It has road trips. It has freckles sprouting on skin and cold beer bottles held against the nape of hot necks. And, perhaps most persuasively, it’s the season of rest and relaxation, the time of year that promises some slack in the staggering demands of everyday life.

But this last promise, in my experience, often goes unfulfilled. Work isn’t school. It doesn’t stop, conveniently, for July and August. I’d argue, in fact, that summer is often a slog – sweating on the subway, eternally seeking the shady side of the street, outfit repeating because my sense of style withers with the heat.

But it didn’t used to be this way. One thing I will give summer is that it’s a mood: evocative and stirring of a past that’s part real, part movie-reel pastiche. 

I think of fleeting teenage romances – sticky limbs on the armrests of someone’s parents’ car, bare feet sliding along pool-water-soaked deck planks, kisses that taste of chlorine.

I think of june bugs, bikes with big wicker baskets, ice cream cones dripping. 

I think of tangled webs of tan lines from different swimsuits, different sandals, different lengths of shorts.

I think of the washed-out colors of The Virgin Suicides, blonde hair shimmering in the sun, Lux languorous on her Grosse Pointe roof.

I met Emmett in the summer of 2010, and our early days together were marked by similar snatches of the season’s signatures: a foam party in Venice, a white dress I bought in Greece, brightly colored umbrellas lined up along beach after beach after beach. I didn’t know it then, but that summer was my last leisurely one. Every year since, the season has been colonized. Within a year of falling in love I moved to Toronto, where I spent the summers scuttling across the searing pavement separating cabs from client offices. Six years later, I lived in a Brooklyn apartment without central air, where I confined myself to the only room with a window unit. Now, at the apex of the most infernal summer ever, the labor of adequately protecting my kids’ skin from the sun is such that I often just opt to stay inside.

Still, it’s hard to be hopeless about the season. In a few weeks, I’ll take my annual shot at capturing summer’s fleeting feeling when Emmett, Finnegan, Kip and I drive north to Canada for a visit with Emmett’s parents, then my mom. I’ve already chosen what I’ll read on the log house’s porch at night, when the heat has broken and the lamplight is golden, and the bookstore I’ll visit if I need to replenish my reads.

Who knows, maybe this will be the year I rise above the mosquitos, the heat rash, and the lethargy of an airless day to once again see the romance in butter-drenched corn-on-the-cob, threadbare swim towels, and glistening lake water. And if I don’t? Well, once I’m back in New York it’ll be September, just in time for the emergence of the actual, don’t-even-bother-denying-it best season of the year: fall.