Denial

Summer is over my head like a hood and I don’t want to come out.  We’re so far into summer I can’t quite remember the softness of spring or regime of school, and just far enough from September it feels like it may never come.  Puddles of pjs and cereal have pooled around the sofa alongside flip-flops, small bright socks, bathing suit bottoms.  No one questions pink lemonade for breakfast, or watching too much TV.  We sleep with sand in our beds, and eat peas until the vines are empty, feet still in the garden. 

I’m trying to forget that summer ever ends and that Jane will start first grade, her first year full day.  Or that Henry will go to school for the first time.  I’m lapping it up.  Staying deep in summer, lush with denial, flooded with flushed faces, bare bodies, beer.  For now it’s summer.  All day long.

{Preview} Portrait of a school-aged kid

In those first moments of summer, kids molt like snakes.  Piles of who they were yesterday ribbon like silk into the fragrant, cut grass.

It doesn’t matter how old you get, you will always remember those first days of summer.  Like the last walk home from the bus, marled pavement and small pebbles rolling beneath your feet.  The shock-of-white-sun from looking over your shoulder, making sure your mom was still there.  The sky.  Extra big.  Extra blue.  Some odd sense you are moving up in the world, even if it’s only from first grade to second.  Your heart high and full in your little chest like a balloon. 

Any fears or worries, or joys for that matter, from the year have fled.  What’s left is the core of a school-aged kid.  Ripe confidence.  Dirty hands.  Curiosity, glistening.  And the amazing feeling you have, and can always, conquer the world.