What Is Summer: The Glow And The Reality

What is summer?

Summer is green, luscious green everywhere. Little garden, growing wildly. First the blooms, then tiny, promising fruit. What a thrill to watch it grow, then pick and enjoy the product of our labors.

(Also: Living in the middle of the woods it means weeds grown up, up and out of control. Until I feel like I'm living in a jungle and no one cares but me.)

Summer is popcicles on a hot, sunny day; homemade ones. Made with the relic Tupperware molds of our past. 

(To be honest: we've made them once this year and they disappeared in about 2 days.)

Summer is fourth of July picnics at the lake. 

(Confession: picnics anywhere, much less all together at the lake, are not really 

what-you-might-say

a regularity with the Eicher family. 

This was special.)

Summer is storing up the bounty for winter. It's watching the full jars line up slowly and feeling the adrenaline rush of the lids sealing with a satisfying 'ping'.

It's a friend sharing her bounteous dill and your mother-in-law digging out more jars from her basement. It's pulling out old recipes, long unused. It's the smell of vinegar and spices. It's tomato sandwiches and cucumbers on butter bread and weary bones at the end of the day. 

(Full Disclosure: It's a sweet, caring husband who takes an afternoon off to go to a produce auction to buy his wife veggies for canning -- a husband who likes to buy things at autions; lots of things. It's a wife who discovers she really may not have learned so very much in 17 years. [That's putting it all very mildly])

Summer is long, lazy days and evenings. It's a game of Clue, first thing in the morning. It's a trip to the Library and gazing in awe at the American Girl Doll collection on display. It's an afternoon spent on the recliner with stacks of books. It's crafting a swing set for your poor Fisherprice children who desperately need one. 

(Reality: It's settling fusses over one person having both Fisherprice toilets while their sibling has none. It's a perpetually toy-strewn living room, non-stop Adventures In Odyssey and people who constantly think they need to be fed. It's hoping for some quiet time in the morning before everyone wakes up for the day.....)

Summer is busy and lazy and fun and taxing, all rolled into one. It is also short and fleeting and deserves to be 

enjoyed to the full. 

How's your summer?