Here we are, at the end of another summer — at least symbolically, if not officially — and I couldn’t be happier.
Hating summer, as I do, is an unpopular opinion. When I tell people, they refuse to accept it. They try to convince me to come with them to their favorite beach. They tell me about a secret swimming hole. They promise to make me the greatest Aperol spritz of my life. They tell me why they love summer.
My hate is prosaic (August heat is what the inside of a cat’s mouth must feel like), my hate is vain (my knees have started to look like two old jack-o’-lanterns, so shorts are out), my hate is contradictory (I love pools so much).
But the main reason I hate summer is because I’m not allowed to.
Summer’s elevator pitch is that it’s the one season per year when we can relax and do what we want. But there’s a rigidity to how we go about it that undermines the whole premise. The pursuit of summer fun can feel so oppressive.
If you don’t want to go to a beach or hike to a swimming hole or drink a spritz on some roof, you give the impression of sourness, as if you’re an ogre who just doesn’t know how to relax, man.
If you don’t want to watch a movie in a park, you feel like such a grouch, like an estival Eeyore who should be out there summering instead of watching a movie as God intended, inside and on a couch. (See? I know how to relax.)
I’d venture to say that you might hate summer, too. Sure, you romanticize it in February. But did you really make it through the last few months without once questioning what’s so great about it anyway?
We all know that maniacal drive to do all those summer things you only get a few months to do, and stitching them together is the thread of enjoying it while it lasts, a concept that really pours the pressure on, while failing to take into account both the earth’s relationship to the sun and the overwhelming evidence suggesting that we’re all in for a hell of a lot more summer if we don’t stop destroying our planet.
I didn’t always hate summer. In fact, as a kid I adored it. I had doting Italian grandparents who never turned down a dinner request for spiedini alla griglia (Italian shish kebab), a great-aunt with a heated pool (that included a diving board and a slide!) and a father who found the idea of going out for ice cream on a steamy evening as irresistible as I did.
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And every summer until we were well into our teens my brother and I attended a local day camp, where we enjoyed V.I.P. status thanks to the fact that the director was our longtime babysitter. This mostly meant we were always paired with our favorite counselors, but it also meant we never had to worry about getting to the front of the line at the camp store and being denied a frozen Charleston Chew because of a lack of funds. In other words, pure bliss.
Some of my most potent memories are from those summers. The year I became a junior counselor was also the year I got my license; being allowed to drive the eight miles from our house to camp for the first time — incandescent sun lighting up the back roads I swore I’d stick to, the Cranberries playing far too loudly — was an experience so heady as to border on stupefying.
And of course, that’s another major problem with summer. Because how can anything compare with the summers of our youth? How can carefree in your 40s possibly compare with carefree in your teens?
The obvious answer is that it can’t, the same way driving a car can never feel as exquisite to me as it did on that first 20-minute voyage to camp.
When I think about it that way, this aggressive push to love summer takes on a slightly more melancholy cast. Maybe we’re all just trying to hurtle ourselves backward through time for three months of the year. Maybe refusing to relinquish the idea of summer as a season of less responsibility and more freedom is a necessary coping mechanism we’ve collectively put in place.
Whatever the case, I have no doubt that a lot of people are feeling depressed today. And certainly, when I’m in the office for our first official full eight-hour Friday since June later this week, I will also be sorely bummed.
But it will be tempered with quiet excitement as I think about things like my neighborhood in the fall. When the light changes and the leaves begin to turn, it becomes so absurdly picturesque that it almost seems unfair to other neighborhoods.
I also love cold-weather food (pasta is better than pasta salad). I love cold-weather clothes (my husband and I look 1,000 times better in the colder months, when wool and turtlenecks are involved). I even love cold-weather music (Nick Drake! Sufjan Stevens’s Christmas album!). I also simply love cold weather (let’s enjoy that while it lasts).
And so, while I offer my condolences to those summer lovers who are already booking next year’s trip to the shore, I also want to offer a few words of perspective. Being an adult may mean we can’t relax the way we used to. We can’t take a season off. We probably shouldn’t be eating frozen Charleston Chews. We lose some of summer’s magic.
But what it also means is that we get to, more or less, dictate when and where we find our fun. We don’t need to limit ourselves to those three short months the way we did when September meant trudging back to school. We get to make any time of year magical. Even February.
Jayna Maleri is a Brooklyn-baser writer and editor. She can’t wait to wear wool socks again.
