By Steve Cebalt
For The (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette
It took me 45 years to come to terms with summer.
In this part of the country, summer is meant to be the season of sun, sand and simple pleasures. Summer is the mythical season of magic and romance, filled with images of watermelon and hammocks and sandals, and the smells of chlorine and sunscreen and freshly-mowed grass. Somewhere along the line, though, I lost the magic.
I started thinking about this after looking at a photo from many summers ago of my daughter Grace. It’s just an ordinary backyard snapshot, blurred by her boundless energy, running barefoot through the grass for the shear thrill of feeling the wind brush her face. When’s the last time you had that feeling?
I recall the thrill as a child of waking up on summer mornings and realizing that I had a full day to spend however I pleased. I might spend four hours collecting tadpoles for no reason, or discovering the tart taste of raw backyard rhubarb, or playing driveway hockey with our dog as the goalie.
Easily influenced by TV, I’d mimic whatever I’d watched – playing cowboys and Indians, or clipping a towel around my neck with a clothespin as a Superman cape.
The notion of summer seemed not seasonal, but permanent; the coming school year was beyond the horizon. Summer was forever.
But that was then.
You see, the magic of summer depends on the illusion that it will last. It’s been said that as you get older, time passes more quickly. A few years ago this phenomenon was explained to me mathematically. For a child of 5, a year represents 20 percent of his or her lifetime. For a man of 50, that same year represents just 2 percent. A child of 5 is experiencing the seasonal changes as if the concept were just invented; a man of 50 has seen this all before, and it becomes routine: Remove the storm windows, spray the dandelions, and go on about your business.
Until very recently, I harbored an uneasy tension each summer. Looking out the window from my office under fluorescent lights, I felt trapped, like I should be doing something more fun outside. And I couldn’t help counting away the days of summer. “June is flying by; it’s almost the Fourth of July, and then the back-to-school sales start and then the cicadas sound the alarm that means that the best of summer has come and gone -- it might as well be over.” The festivals and fireworks that mark the passing of summer in our region didn’t thrill me much. And yet I couldn’t shake the restless feeling that I was missing something, and the “best time of the year” was slipping by.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally realized: Summer is just not my thing. I love the autumn, and I enjoy the winter and spring. But I’d been conditioned to think, as so many people do, that summer is the superior season. It simply had never occurred to me that summer isn’t for everybody, and that I prefer the other seasons. And, oddly enough, I now enjoy the summers more, without the pressure I’d been placing on myself to capture the passing season like catching a firefly in a jar.
The landscape of summer is painted in green. I think that’s one reason it is a favorite time for so many people. It reminds us of the days when we, too, were green -- green and innocent, running barefoot just for joy, oblivious to the coming frost.
Steve Cebalt is a Fort Wayne writer who spends his summers happily enough under the fluorescent lights at Highview LLC. He wrote this for The Journal Gazette.
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