the sum of me.

school is out.  i've been cleaning my classroom, trying to organize, trying to get my head right.  i like the emptiness of it.  i like that i have an ending to embrace, knowing a beginning will be here soon enough.

i love that i work at a place where a child does cartwheels to get to the water fountain, and where a boy schools another kid on the complexity of human sexuality (while letting him know it has nothing to do with the stripes in his hair).  i love that the kids at graduation sing "ain't no mountain high enough".  i love that i can sit with my colleagues at lunch and laugh about really, really inappropriate things together.

summer always brings me to melancholy; there's something about the smell of sunscreen combined with the way the sky looks at the end of the long days that takes me wholly, and infuses me with bittersweet.  i remember the joy of summer vacation as a child, the weighty promise of romantic encounters as a teenager.  everything seemed heightened in the summer, like our every move was being filmed.

its funny that as an adult i still have my year mapped out as september-june.  my body expects to be done with something right about now, and it will start to get antsy at the end of august to meet my next group of people i get to hang out with for ten months.  how weird is that?  my five and six year-old co-workers change every year in kindergarten; i never know what kind of work place i will have until we all settle in to some kind of awareness of each other, which usually happens sometime in october.  until then, i just hope for the best.

summer is grape big league chew, bikini area razor burn, dirty bare feet and trying to negotiate whether or not i can wear a shirt without a bra.  it is my mother in her pool, egging her grandchildren on, getting them to dive off the deep end.  it is my husband alternately furious and joyful, depending on the red sox score.  it is my children saying they are bored.  it is slightly sunburned shoulders.  it is cold beer that my brother brings to a family cookout.  it is horseneck beach, circa 1989.  it is sex.  it is my time to go back to massachusetts, and steep in the humidity, the people, the memories, the smell of a thunderstorm that is just around the corner.

i love winter with every fiber of my being, but summer is my saving grace.