Summer Now, Summer Then

The first day of summer. It’s hard to know what exactly to make of that.
There was a time, which lives vaguely in my distant memory, when summer really mattered. When there was something carefree about the time of year. Well, I’m a freelancer now—the nice word for unemployed—so I can wear shorts. And I am, right now. But the work piles up, whether it pays enough to pay for the mortgage or not, and there are worried about toilet repairs (no, really, that is what I woke up thinking about) or larger problems. I’m an adult. And I think of summer really as a season of childhood.
I don’t want to get too nostalgic about it, especially since I cannot really remember what I thought about those days. Probably even as a young person I was a bit taken aback by the idea of summer, the somewhat forced gaiety of it all. The duty of relaxing. But probably I preferred summer to going to school or handling the regular responsibilities of the fall and the spring.
One summer I remember. The one after high school. The one where I was really dating for the first time. I remember having worked previous summers, but that summer I got a bit of money, scholarship money really, and my mom gave me permission to goof off in July and most of August, until I went to college at the end of the month. That was a hell of a summer. I remember these sense of having fun—and only having fun—that summer. I’m not sure what I did, but there was the notion very much alive that I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I don’t think I’ve felt that way since the summer of 1986. And I don’t think I ever will.