Summer is great, particularly when it ends

The memories are plenty worth the effort, but for parents, finding a new routine each week is exhausting

(Image: Visiting our pal AC in beautiful Grand Bend.)

The pictures in the frames are beautiful. It’s Mom, Dad, it’s kids, it’s the ocean. The swimwear has neon, the hair is wet, the smiles are big. The fun that summer holds, the point of the grand excursions, they’re well captured there in that frame, and those times are so worth it. The nostalgia isn’t unjustified.

Just out of that frame, which held that little bellybutton of perfection, is the dried umbilical cord of a vast effort. It’s towels and sunscreen and purchased beach toys and chairs and waters and snacks. It’s a drive or a flight or both, it’s aligning schedules with family or friends or both, it’s a lot. Summer is undeniably a wonderful season, and here in Canada we use it make memories that sustain us through the colder winters.

But it has the impermanence of a paper straw, a temporary feel that has me uneasy as soon as winter starts to loosen its grasp. And like that straw, summer is fine at first, until it isn’t. It’s never felt like “real life,” the whole of it a drawn-out version of a couch-surfing weekend on a relative’s too-soft pillow.

The uneasiness isn’t hard to trace with the guardrails of routine shucked clean off.

It wasn’t always that way, the uneasiness, I know that for sure. Maybe there used to be some, but the kids added most of that spice, where every week presents some fresh challenge, a detail that could be missed that could ruin a day. Getting a routine established with your family is one of a parent’s foremost challenges, and the changing plans of each summer week means the second you find one, it’s time for a new one. The roughly nine-week school-less calendar is an obstacle course to be run with the feeling you could fall clean off the side with any given step.

Lord, if I forget her goggles, this whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

My 5-year-old is in a daycare summer program, which presents a reasonable expectation of daily preparedness, but my eight year old’s schedule holds malice. It includes five sessions of weeklong camps at various locations. Then there’s our (lovely!) weeklong trip to my wife’s family in NY (and some years Kelowna to see mine), a couple weeks “off” for the boy (which means Mom and Dad are “on”), and it all means that each day starts with a scavenger hunt of required items measured against the clock of getting both kids off to wherever it is they have to go.

Where is this place, is anyone we know in this camp, what time is pick-up again?

It ain’t cheap, either. We’re fortunate to be able to do it, and are constantly grateful for that, but with no family in the province of Ontario and work to be done, the cost doesn’t feel super optional.

Beyond the family stuff, summer in Canada carries the crush of expectation. It can stretch on, that long wait for the winter cold to set us free, and so that same race against the clock exists not just before camp starts, but to make outdoor memories before the cold returns.

Have you camped, been to a cottage? Did you get out to Toronto Island? Have you been up to the Muskokas, oh you have to get up to the Muskokas, they’re just so beautiful.

At my age many of my friends have kids, which means they’ve faced these pressures too, also learned that you have to plan early, and like us have a summer itinerary booked well before the Easter Bunny makes the rounds, usually before the leprechauns show up. And so you compare jammed calendars and try to wedge in a golf game, or a barbecue, and suddenly all the things you said you’d do in the winter seem unattainable.

It goes too fast, for sure. And it can’t be over soon enough.

If I could skip it entirely, I wouldn’t. The still perfection of an evening walk, the warm rising sun on the front porch with a weekend coffee, and hey, the golf. I love our family’s road trips, and when our kids are out scootering around out past their usual bedtimes while our wonderful neighbours stroll out to the sidewalk to just, be outside … it’s all great.

I never want it to end.

I can’t wait for it to be over.

I miss real life. I like real life.

I used to not just dislike structure, I writhed against it. The hockey life pounds you flat with itineraries, most every day is laid out hour on the hour, often well finer. Whether it was in my nature or it came as a result of that I don’t know, but the second I could shake free of routine I shook like a dog through a sprinkler.

Heading deeper into the summer schedule now - hello, August - I admit that thoughts of fall flit through my mind almost daily. I dare not allow myself to think too much about it though or it would crush my summer spirit.

It’s just so that it’s better - so much better, it just is - and it’s really hard pretending it isn’t to the pro-summer propagandists with whom I don’t feel like arguing.

Because boy, those thoughts will get you, right? The kids - back in school, going to the same place, launched into each day with a clear plan. A low evening sun through thinning trees, brown crunching leaves, football on TV as the sports slowly return, stew in a crockpot, that new-hoody feeling. Just getting to hide in your clothes again is a perk.

And like many, I like being warm. Being warm is great. But:

For sure.

Now, I know what some of this fall fantasizing is, and it’s truly a response to the pressure of those Canadian summers. My wife and I lived for three years in Phoenix, which gets the most “clear days” per year with 211 (among major US cities). They get rain on about 35 days per year, just 7-8 inches per year.

Living like that, you get over “nice” days. You can spend all day sitting on your couch (or perhaps in a pub) with a pristine blue sky out the front door, because tomorrow will probably offer the same. You miss one of those in the summer in Toronto and it’s devastating. On a nice summer day here, it can be a Tuesday, and suddenly everyone’s a remote worker and emails come back slow. People have huge chunks of “personal time” blocked off on their work calendar, sometimes 4-5 hours, depending on how slow the group in front is playing. People need those nice days, they use them, and they appreciate them. I do too.

But already having weird schedules in summer, combined with the surprise “nice day” pressure, and you’ve lost further control of your schedule.

Don’t push me to do stuff just because there’s no clouds, OK?

And still, as days pass, there’s a worry (at least partially brought on by social media and comparison, that old thief of joy), and it’s: Have we done enough to have “had a great summer?"

Are you refreshed? Ready to get back at it?

Maybe we should get off the couch after dinner and go for one more evening walk, I guess?

Some day again soon the tiresome routine, the very same one I fought by the end of the school year will return, and I will welcome it not with a handshake, but a hug. I’ll wear jeans and and a long-sleeve and drink hot coffee at noon. I will look back at our summer memories with fondness, rather than forward with worry. I too will have loved summer, like everyone else.

One doesn’t have to slander the sunny season to appreciate fall. Summer is great. Summer is a break from the routine, it’s t-shirts and ice cream, it’s a beautiful season.

Summer is great.

It’s great, particularly when it ends.