Weekend Things: Summering

I've been feeling a little cranky--as I always do this time of year--that summer's moving by way too fast, and I'm not enjoying it to its fullest.

This weekend was one of those with the perfect beach weather, the kind where you feel guilty for not going out and spending the whole time in the sand and saltwater, but at the same time is filled with little niggly to-do's, like picking kids up from sleepovers, and then end of season baseball awards, and more housework than you care to think about, and you feel kind of secretly relieved for the excuse to just stay home and, if only for a minute, pretend like you're ten years old again, in a middle of a summer that is terminally, boringly, gloriously endless, with nothing to do but walk to the park and collect armfuls of books from the bookmobile and suck all of the juice out of homemade grape popsicles and then crunch the remaining clear ice between your teeth, right before you run through the sprinkler.

Okay, I didn't actually do all of that.

Or any of that.

But I did sneak a few minutes in the hammock.

And I thought a lot about why didn't I become a teacher?

Kids, listen to me. Become a teacher when you grow up. Never mind how hard they work. I'm talking summers off, people!

And we all waded up the river, 

Capturing pictures of damselflies and actual crawdads along the way.

It wasn't endless. In fact it was too short. And too busy. But it was good.