Your Best Life Later
Summer selves, sauce season, salt on the rim.
It’s Little Friday. And it’s May already. I haven’t been able to get my hands around the passing of time all year. Hoping summer’s slow, sticky days make all these moments a little easier to hold. But May means the end of soccer season and my husband’s birthday, so this weekend I’ll celebrate him with a fancy dinner and beyond that….who knows. A rare free weekend that I will almost surely try to fill with ~ accomplishing things ~. May you get to do all that you want to do this weekend and no more.
When you’re homeschooled, not much changes from year to year. Your teacher, your classroom, your schedule—all familiar. You don’t even have an excuse to buy a new bookbag because you never needed one in the first place. Even so, summer break dawned for me every year with the potential for total transformation. I’ll be a different person by next grade is a powerful myth. The sheer rate of childhood growth alone offers just enough evidence to keep the dream alive: some years, classmates do shoot up multiple inches or suddenly inherit curves in the span of a summer. Friends finish one grade just as awkward and giggly as you, but then start another cool, worldly, and newly boyfriend-ed. If it could happen to them, it could happen to me.
That vague, shimmery sense of possibility is why summer can feel like a portal for change. Unhooked from strict schedules and less defined by routine than the rest of the year, summer is a liminal space. A threshold. You don’t know what awaits you on the other side, and logic loses signal. Maybe even a little bit of magical thinking about who you might become moves in. I am already highly attuned to seasonal change as opportunities for reinvention. I love a fresh start, a blank page, the beginning of a plan. So even though I never had a school to return to, I always fell for the idea that somehow I’d be different at summer’s end.
Now, of course, I’m a grown-up and summer loses a bit of its luster. Responsibilities don’t end and I don’t graduate to the next level. My to-do list this week is all nailing down summer babysitters and summer camps for my kids, who require all the same care and attention as they do the rest of the year. And still — the days are lengthening and my restraints are loosening. The dream of a different self is already unfurling. I am quicker to let them stay up later on a school night, a down payment on the vibrant dinners I’ll make and the fun things we’ll do and the spontaneous adventures I’ll say yes to. I am imagining a revised version of myself, one who is somehow both incredibly structured and impossibly chill.
August will eventually arrive with a thud, and I won’t be a different person. I know this by now. But my children honestly might. And watching their transformations unfold, how rapidly they enter the portal and emerge changed, gives a new meaning to my summer ambitions. We can’t go backward. This is the only summer we have together. Dreaming about what my best self could be like is maybe the first step toward giving it to them.
What to do this weekend? Maybe you should….
Whiz up a craveable red pepper feta sauce. Grilling season has returned, which means so has sauce season. Here’s a delicious, Mediterranean sauce that is a dream drizzled on grilled proteins and veg. Into a blender add 1 drained jar of roasted red peppers, a couple cloves of garlic, 6 oz. feta cheese, 1/4 c. plain Greek yogurt, big squeeze of lemon juice, drizzle of olive oil, and a healthy pinch of salt. Blend until very smooth; taste and adjust accordingly.
Go on a margarita romp with friends. Claudia Winkleman once said a margarita is “the promise of a big night…anything could happen. It’s all a bit ring-a-ding-ding, the margarita,” and I think she’s exactly right. As perfect as she is unpretentious, the margarita is a fun girl to pal around with on, say, an arbitrary quest to find the “best” margarita available to you. Identify a few local spots for sampling, collect a couple friends to come along and offer key insights, determine some criteria before setting out. In kindness to your future self, don’t forget to hydrate along the way.
Take a nap outside. In college, I went through a very brief phase of napping outside on old quilts with my friends. (This was also my long floral skirts from the thrift store phase, if that helps.) People passing by thought we were weird, and they were right, but it didn’t subtract any joy from the experience of snoozing in the sun, brushed by an occasional breeze. If you can make an outdoor nap happen somewhere in your weekend, I still recommend it.
Have a great weekend, friends. Thanks for reading.