summertime

Summertime holds so much promise. You wake up to a fan, and bare feet on the floor, and there is no fire to light in the stove, no snow to shovel. Getting dressed takes half a second, and everything is easy.

Right?

But then there are the other demands the season places on your time. The lawn needing to be mowed. The meadow needing to be mowed. The garden to be weeded and planted and fertilized and thinned and turned and planted again. The repairs to the house and the projects you would never undertake in the colder months, rebuilding the chicken run or clearing brush.

It is easy to lose the sense of ease that the summer brings. I used to work jobs (sailing, farming) that required me to work the hardest during the summer. More recently, I worked most weekends of the summer, either going to markets or teaching at home or elsewhere. There was money to be made and I was hungry to make it.

This year is the first year that I have deliberately refused to teach on the weekends, keeping them open instead for projects and family time. This is also the first year in many years that we have stayed on top of the garden, keeping it watered and weeded. Who knows? Maybe it will be the first year in many when I truly relax into the easy promise of summer.

One thing is for sure. It will only happen if I make that choice. Because that ease? That's a vacuum. And everything, at all times, tries to relentlessly fill a vacuum.