When did summer get so busy?

In search of a spacious summer and what I learned from a week at "camp"

It’s still raining or dripping or waiting to rain again. The rumble and the rustle of the undulating water, the patter pit of raindrops on the car roof, the tweet of birds so much like home in the early morning.

The water gunmetal grey, cadet blue, my mind wracks the crayon box—the 64-color box with a built in sharpener—for the color that is not teal but blue with just a hint of green or green on the edge of gray-blue. The sky still rain storm gray white.

In the green gray water, seal heads, sleek and black, a cormorant (I think) also sleek, also black, dips under the water, resurfaces. Again.

Dune grass, pale and green, straw-tipped gyrates in the breeze. A strip of sand. Gray-blue-green water stretching out to white sky horizon.

After the rain — Coast Guard Beach, Truro, MA

The sound of feet on wet pavement. A flare of music. An electric car’s “I’m here” hum. Vague voices. Retreat. The never silent quiet returns.

When I walk down onto the beach, the rolling roar of the water is louder, the breeze stiffer. Birds swoop, soar, dip, alone or in pairs. A boast chugs across the depths. The waves deepen, long rollers billowing into shore.

---

I just got back from Remote Work Summer Camp. A week of work that somehow felt more like a vacation than any time off I’ve had this summer. But more than that, it felt like the elusive summer I’ve sought for years.

My vision of summer:

The long endless stretch of June stretching to September like the water to the sky at the horizon.

There was structure to the summers of my youth—daily swimming lessons, weekly tennis lessons, a chore chart for the beach—but mostly it felt wide open and expansive (at the time, sometimes dully endless).

I spent my time

with long days at the beach
reading stacks of books
exploring in the woods
riding bikes and playing kick the can in the neighborhood
making things out of random stuff we had around the house

And being bored.

I long for this openness. I seek this kind of summer even now 40 years after I last experienced it. Somewhere in there I got a job in the summer and things shifted, but the open-endedness, the spaciousness of summer is still what sticks with me.

I spent the week in Truro, staying with a friend, both of us with deliberately lighter work schedules. I stayed a week with no other responsibilities beside showing up for a few work things and feeding myself.

That week stretched out before me luxuriously. I savored it even before I packed up the car. While there:

I walked four beaches and saw, heard, smelled, felt the energy of the ocean every day.

I started two books¹, visited two new libraries and one new books store.

Fun Find: the Provincetown Library has a half-scale replica of a schooner. Did this delight me? It did.

I went to a naturalist slideshow/reading, learned the names that I do not remember but have tucked in my brain to maybe seek out later for the various gulls (not generic seagulls) and the nickname horseheads, for the ubiquitous gray seals.

I had a leisurely lunch and long beach walk and talks. I caught up on my correspondence.²

I delighted in light of the not yet full moon and what I thought was probably a planet.³

I walked in the woods and by the edge of a pond and snacked on wild blueberries.

I did not think about soccer schedules or what other people wanted for dinner or when anyone would be home.

---

My desire for the summer of my youth is not mine alone. So often I see people seeking this kind of summer trying to create an analog summer.

I wrote the beginning of this not on my laptop, but on paper, looking out at oaks and mountain laurel, rough bark, glossy leaves, lichened trunks. I wrote this breathing salt air heavy with moisture.

My dream summers were before the Internet, cell phones, our always connectedness. It was as slower time. A time of letters not text or even email. A time of encyclopedias and reference librarians and wondering, not Google and AI, not instant answers.

---

What do you call a group of seals?

I have no service, so I can’t call up an easy answer. Instead I tumble the idea round like rocks under water.

A slew of seals
a sleek
a surfacing.

I ponder a pod, but that’s whales, a raft, no, I think, that’s otters.

A bobbing of seals
a circus
an undulation.

Darker, a shark bait. A survival.

A frolic of seals
a bobbing,
a celebration.

Because I couldn’t look it up⁴, I had to sit with wondering, playing with possibilities, ideas bobbing like the seals themselves, eyes on the seals instead of the small glowing, rectangle.

---

Maybe there is something to analog or low tech summer.

I found that on my No Tech November Nights, how turning off the tech opens up space to read, to make things by hand, to play games, to pause and ponder.

I’ve found in my semi-analog life this summer how lovely it is to walk without my phone—to forget step count, to not be able to snap a picture, to actually have to look, notice, see, take in.

How lovely to not think about documenting my life, to not be interrupted by other people’s questions.

How lovely to live with the not knowing the answer when a question comes up, to float in attention and curiosity.

---

I see other people craving the freedom and expansiveness of summer, and so often it is tied to the phone, the always on-lineness, but I think that overlooks the “adulting” part.

In 1986, I wasn’t doing laundry, making dinner (and figuring out what it was going to be) or wondering who needed a ride. I wasn’t working.

Part of what we want is a break in a a world where we are always on. Part of what we want is a break from responsibility, from the daily drudgery of making life happen.

I want to sit and finish a book in a day like my kids do. I want to work out and hangout. I want to ramble and explore in the woods, without looking at the time. I want to have long rambling conversations.

I want room to be bored, to see what I do to fill that time when—and here’s where the analog world does come in—what do I do to fill the time when there aren’t easy, quick distractions?

Do I start another book, play in the garden, make pickles?

Do I take a nap, make a stamp, sit on the porch with a book I don’t actually read?

Do I have long meandering conversations, linger for hours over meal, eat a dripping popsicle?

Do make something out of the odds and ends in the house, fit pieces into a puzzle, walk in the woods?

Do I start an epic project I may never finish? And be okay with that?

I want the space to choose.

Practices from this summer

Every week is not Remote Work Summer Camp, but I’ve played with these five things to have a more expansive summer:

• Put my phone away.
  Walk without it. Leave it in the house when I’m in the garden or at a gathering. My kids get a little annoyed sometimes when I don’t respond, but overall it hasn’t been catastrophe. Even the time they texted to see if I wanted cookies, I got back and there were some left for me.
  

• Start my day in the garden.
  I have a long time practice of starting my day reading before I pick up my phone or open my laptop, but after a chapter or two I usually switch over to NYT word games.
  
  For this season, I’m moving my word games later in the day. I’m watering or wandering the garden, noticing what’s ripe or needing tending, snacking on raspberries or cherry tomatoes.
  

• Do as much as I can outside.
  We eat all of our meals on the porch or at the picnic table unless the rain is driving too hard to stay dry even under shelter. That means as we move toward September and the start of school, we’ll need to excavate the dining room table.
  
  I work out in the Airnaseum, read on the porch or library patio, work by the harbor or somewhere else in the shade. Sit on the beach.
  

• Use my hands.
  Make things that honor the season, like strawberry jam and brownie ice cream sandwiches with strawberry ice cream. Or make things like new cards that I use to write letters.
  
  Or deadhead the flowers or pull the weeds or crush a bit of lemon balm or mint or lavender just to smell it.
  

• Seek novelty.
  I love the word explore for summer, and sometimes it feels hard to find the time for to try new things. Still, so far this summer, new beaches, new recipes, three new libraries, a new museum with a delightful recycled book art exhibit.

---

I’d love to know:

• How are you creating spaciousness or expansiveness in this season?

• What new places have your explored? What new things have you discovered?

• What’s a question you are pondering instead of seeking the quick answer?

• What’s on your summer reading list?

• What’s one word or image that conjures summer for you?

1. I’m reading The Typing Lady (a birthday gift from my daughter) and The Emilys (a gift from myself for my birthday this line selling me: “It’s Spring again, the Earth in early, urgent viridescence.” The description of the season. The words.)

2. Anna Brones physical, snail mail newsletter is sold out for summer, but worth getting for fall. The summer edition was a perfect read for my camp week. I wrote a note in reply along with notes to friends I’ve been meaning to send letters to. And delight of delights, I came back to mail — the singlet I ordered (more on that later) and a zine trade with Ann Vevera of Wait a Minute!

Would you like a snail mail note? DM me your address. I love sending letters, and it’s peak analog summer : )

3. I did not pull out a night sky app — analog summer and all, plus my phone is too old to run many apps. I did some research when I got back. I think what we were seeing was not a planet, but the star Antares.

4. Later I did look it up — pod in the water, herd. on land. Boring. I like my answers better, and I had fun playing with the words. For the rest of camp week, we called the seals, a celebration.