Summer is taking it's first full bite and I am celebrating with ice cream and iced tea and listening to my summer playlist, which includes a lot of Lana Del Rey and 80's rock, but also ample amounts of Mazzy Star. In the mid-90's I used to haul my walkman and reading material and notebooks out in these sort of long summer evenings, spread out a blanket on the deck to get out of the heat in the house, unbearable by sunset. I would read until the light was gone, or until I couldn't see from the candles and lanterns and twinkle lights we'd strung up in the trees. Again, like my entry on summer writing, these were long, days without time or schedules or much responsibility. I'd sleep into the afternoon and stay up til dawn. We'd go to cheap movies at the mall and hang out at Barnes & Noble, or before it, Media Play. . Sometimes I had rehearsal for student plays I was stage managing or working tech on, but mostly my time was my own. I'd make enough money to buy books or fund outings, mostly with my sister in tow, by cleaning the house and doing tasks around the house, but it was a startlingly simple life (I worked some intermittent paid things like assisting the theatre dept and proofreading in the English Dept during the year, but with scholarships/grants covering most of my coursework, I lived rather frugally with my parents during college, while mostly doing unpaid things. This seemed good at the time, but it made getting a job when I actually had to harder without much practical experience like typing and answering phones or customer service.)
It's hard to pick one summer from the other, since they were similar. There was the summer I spent in front of a fan reading novels where it would storm every night around midnight and knock out the power. . The summer I spent listening to Janice Ian albums Id found in my mom's collection in the basement. The summer there were earwigs everywhere--under towels in the bathroom, in the carpet, hidden in the couch. We'd hit the outdoor flea markets more than the thrift stores in those days every weekend. We'd also go to the greyhound track in Lake Geneva, where I never really bet on anything, but enjoyed picking the winners for my dad based on which pup looked the liveliest. Like in my childhood, we'd take long rides on weekend afternoons to surrounding towns or over the border into Wisconsin. Or we'd go up for family gatherings in Black River to see my grandfather when he was alive. My high school summers had a lot more camping, but these were the years of staying in at the Arrowhead Lodge, where I once saw lightning strike the fountain in the middle of the pond and it was broken for a decade. Once saw a giant blue heron just hanging out on the lawn outside the windows in the mist and it seemed like a dream.
This weekend, it's supposed to be hot, but I haven't yet put the fans in the window and there seems to be a breeze that is keeping things cool so far , I have some things to work on Mon & Tues for the press, but the weekend proper, besides an apartment tidy-up and need to switch out spring for summer clothes, but otherwise, don't have much on the docket except watching horror documentaries and eating large amounts of mint chip.
