Summer is slowly whittling away…

I have reached the half-way point for summer break (gotta go back to work on August 10), and yet there’s still so much I want to do: the beach, Greenfield Village, the Detroit Zoo, up north again, finish a short story, finish Avalon Summer, finish Gates to Illvelion, read more books (so many books!). It’s not like this summer has been sloppy or anything — we’ve actually done quite a bit. But there’s so much more that I want to do. I can’t figure out why it feels like the summer days have slipped through my fingers…

Maybe it’s because I HAVE done so much already. Maybe that sense of going places and doing things has caused a kind of drift, like when one is swimming and the tide slowly carries one farther and farther from shore. Summer drift has pulled me out past the breakers.

Last summer, we stayed home and did mostly nothing. We tried to be cautious because of Covid. We embraced peak Idler. (It also helped that I had been working from home since March and so spring simply melded into summer and it all felt like a hazy fog of time.)

This summer, of course, now that I’m vaccinated, and our local Covid numbers are low, we feel safer, and we’ve ventured forth. So instead of a hazy fog of time, we’re in a rip tide. Time has sped up. We are racing toward the end without any feeling that time has passed. This moment is the same moment as the first summer day; June 1st and July 7th are two points on the line, but we’re moving so quickly, they feel the same. All points are the same. And when summer ends and I go back to teaching, it will feel as if no days have passed, as if summer has just started.

But of course, summer will have ended. And I still have so much to do.