Thirteen Ways of Looking at Summer

It’s finals week at Little Town U., and since I don’t have finals to give, I’m in that magic, brief lull between brutal Semester’s constant pounding, the pile of portfolio grading on my desk, and the wantonness of spring gardens that need squelching before they go all jungle on me.

I’m not teaching this summer. For those who think “school teachers are slacker pansies, with their summers off,” this is my first summer off in probably 20 years. I’m all a’jitter with possibilities and have started a to-do list. I won’t get to all of these; I’m great at making lists, but I seldom look at them once they’re made. In fact, I usually lose them. It’s as if just listing something is accomplishment enough. I also have a teensy weensy stubborn streak, and my list is not the boss of me, dangit. But here’s what I’m dreaming up:

1. Spend time with my family – Ray, Mom, the kids, the grandkids. So many patio BBQ’s, hugs, swaddles, zoo trips, belly-laughs…so little time.

2. Roller skate – someone brought up Skateland in Omaha recently. I spent many hours there in junior high, whizzing around the Big Circle, dodging potential gropes from pimply boys and girls, checking my hair & makeup in the bathroom mirror...good times. I still have my childhood metal clamp-on skates, and I’m pretty sure my muscles remember the moves. If I find my skate key, watch out.

3. Plan a trip to Ecuador – my brother and his wife have a condo in the mountains, not far from Quito. How cool would it be to hike, take photos, and write there? If plane fares ever come down to school marm affordability, I’m so there.

4. Do a Buddhist meditation retreat – I’m looking at Shambala Mountain Center in Colorado for 2 days. It’s a retreat for beginners, a sort of total immersion “learn to meditate.” I’ve attempted meditation off and on for 30 years and have read practically every book ever published on the subject, but I’m hopeless at stilling this mind. It’s scary inside my head. I can spend 15 minutes thinking about how cool it would be to stop thinking for 15 minutes. In spite of my own ineptitude, I’m convinced that meditation is essential to direct, first-hand experience of spiritual truth; I don’t know what “it” is, but I know there’s something, and I’m pretty sure meditation is the key. Sadly, I have a couple of vices I should tackle in order to get myself as clear as possible before I go. Like procrastination and caffeine, both of which I’ll work on. Later.

5. Paint – My kitchen is pale steel blue. Right now, I have swatches of banana cream yellow and rose mauve painted on my white living/dining/music room walls, one big, open L-shaped space. I’m gonna paint these walls in spite of the fact that I have the interior design skills of, say, a small burrowing rodent.

6. Go to Village Inn at 3 a.m. – You know how, if you live in an old rented farmhouse with a bunch of hippies, sometimes you get up at 3 a.m., turn on the kitchen light, and all manner of seedy nocturnal wildlife scurries for the cupboards? Yeah, well that’s Village Inn at 3 a.m. It’s an amazing, revealing study in the diversity of human life and in one’s own capacity for unconditional compassion. With coffee.

7. Re-do my downstairs bathroom – My bathroom is tiled with small blue ceramic tile, floor-to-ceiling. I’ve never tiled before, so this oughtta be fun. My friend G does remodeling for living. She’ll help, right? After all, what girl doesn’t like wielding a hammer and crowbar?

8. Work on the new poetry manuscript – It’s well underway but needs some dedicated, daily work. Printing a book myself is getting too expensive, and I’m too impatient to send my stuff out to publishers/journals hoping for that 1 in 500 nibble, so I’ll bind this one in old leather tied with ribbon, for someone to “discover” long after I’ve gone on to pen celestial poems (or fiery manifestos). Publishing's awesome, but it's the making that matters.

9. Make wine – Ray got me a deluxe winemaking setup last Christmas. Our acreage is wooded with wild plums. My friend V has been making wine for a while now and knows the drill. It’s a perfect storm of wine-making wizardry.

10. Write a song – songwriting and poetry writing are two different animals. I don't care what Raffi says--good songs are not sung poems. Songwriting uses a different part of the brain, I think, one I may have burnt out in my angst-filled adolescence. I’ll try the gear-shift, though; the peacocks will be my test audience. Poor, poor peacocks.

11. Spin – Speaking of meditation, one of the most meditative things I know of is spinning. Not the hard-body, maniac biking kind—the peaceful Sleeping Beauty kind. I have an Ashford spinning wheel and at least 3 Rubbermaid tubs of every possible kind of wool, camel, silk, dog hair, angora and llama fiber. I could spin enough yarn to knit socks for every peacock & tree on the farm. See http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local-beat/Midnight-Knitter-Throwing-Cape-May-for-a-Loop-87333152.html

12. Garden, can, dry, freeze – Prairie people have an instinctual need to put food by, to stock the larder. We know Jack Blizzard’s sniggering in his sleeve, just waiting to catch us without venison, flour and potatoes.

13. Relax – I love silence, but I’m no good at idleness. So one of my main objectives for this summer, and probably the hardest task on my list, is to learn to relax. To sit. To watch. To listen. To breathe. To breathe. To breathe.