Summer Reset

There are a million reasons to love summer: long days, warm weather, sweet-smelling rain, twilight walks, and fun vacations. There is summer food, and there are so many books. I get to follow my kids’ interests slowly and have time to sit and talk with my husband.

And, of course, there’s writing. Last summer I wrote all the time. I couldn’t stop writing. I joined a writing group and I sat on my back porch in the afternoons with the ceiling fan on for our Google Meets and piled up blog posts and started other ideas. I soaked in writing, and I loved it.

I looked forward to summer writing this year. I love blogging, but I also love long-form writing, and I hoped that I would be able to spend some warm afternoons on the porch, working out a story idea to outline and dream through. Instead, I have spent most of my writing in brain dumps for long stretches of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages and have tried to struggle through a blog post every week, always relieved when there is something finished I could maybe post. It’s not that I don’t have the time; it’s that I don’t have the words. I stare at the blank screen and don’t know what to say. Spiders are building webs on my porch chair as I avoid it. I open the computer and type something for a few minutes and then shut it, feeling half grateful that I did something and half guilty that it wasn’t more or better.

It’s unfair to compare this summer to last summer, when this house, this neighborhood, were basically my whole world. Sometimes I still can’t look at pictures of last summer without feeling bewildered. So many things were shaken last summer, and they are not all made right. I started this summer with problems with my jaw, problems with my eyes, so full of tension. Yet somehow I expected the flipping of the calendar page into June to solve it all.

So I’m trying to be patient with myself. I read constantly, which is an escape, but I also let my son pick what he wanted us to read together, and we started the last Harry Potter book for a re-read. I play War with him and my daughter, and I shout louder than they do. I make silly jokes and sing when I want. I spend time in the hammock, staring at the sky. I fall asleep out there in mid-afternoon instead of writing, and I say okay, for right now, this is enough. There will be more when there is more. Maybe it’s okay to just be.