I know I say this every year, but it’s been a busy summer. It’s been too busy, which is also something I say every year at this time, when the sun starts dipping behind the hill across the lake before we’ve finished supper, and we need a fire to take the chill off in the mornings, and I wake up in the middle of a windy night because acorns are landing on the metal roof and rattling all the way down.
This is when I realize that I haven’t gotten around to so many of the things that made summer summer when I was a child and free of responsibilities. I haven’t spent enough time on the deck, or on the screened porch, or in a canoe. I haven’t had even one afternoon of lying in the hammock for hours with a book, dozing between chapters, pulling lazily on a rope tied to a nearby tree to set myself rocking, but not too fast.
And it’s not just the hallmarks of a lazy summer that I regret not having gotten around to. There’s that list, titled “2024 Camp Projects” and optimistically jotted down in the spring—that magical time when the world seems new and the energy boundless and all things possible. As we’ve tidied up for company, it has moved from the table to the bookcase to the desk more times than I can count. Very few of the items on the list have even been started, and even fewer have been completed and crossed off—not “Trim bushes in boat beach,” nor “Weave new seats for canoe,” nor even “Figure out why pump runs so much—new pressure tank needed?”
Next spring, in my annual surge of optimism, I’ll draw a line through “2024,” retitle the list “2025 Camp Projects,” and add a few more tasks. One or two may even get done, although probably not that one about the pressure tank; that’s been on the list for a few summers already now.
I brought my new electric chainsaw from home to camp to trim the bushes. I ordered a roll of webbing to replace the canoe seats. I am a great beginner of projects, but not much of a finisher.
In my desk drawers and the files on my computer, I have what probably amounts to about a hundred unfinished writing projects, everything from notes scribbled down in a fit of inspiration to about 75 percent of a novel and maybe half of a short story collection. Every once in a while, I pull something out, reread it, and am pleasantly surprised to find that it’s not half bad, but that’s about as far as I usually get.
Sixteen years ago, in the early spring—season of perpetual optimism—I emailed my siblings:
“I’m working on a new writing project, and I’m going to need lots of help from all of you. I’ve started writing a kind of memoir, written in two voices, mine and Mom’s…”
There were several other email exchanges, in 2013, 2015, 2021, and, finally, on March 25, 2024:
“I’m on vacation this week! It’s the first time in five years that I’ve taken a whole week off at once, and I’m determined to use it to make some real progress on wrapping up the first draft of Just Like Glass. Twenty years since Mom died seems like long enough to get this thing done!”
It is to my siblings’ credit that, each time I emailed them with more questions and renewed enthusiasm for the project, they responded with thoughtful answers, rather than eye-rolls. None of them pointed out that they had heard that tired story before.
Maybe it was that week-long kick-start in March that did it. Maybe it was the 20-year anniversary of my mom’s death in April. Maybe it was remembering my sister-in-law Peggy’s admonition, only a few months before her own passing, that I really needed to get that book finished while they were all still here to read it.
Whatever the motivation was, it got me up early every morning to spend a couple of hours writing in a quiet house. By the time we moved to camp in late May, I was down to just two short chapters to finish.
I might have gotten stalled again. I might have opted for more time on the deck or the porch with a book, or in the hammock or the canoe. But much of early June was chilly and damp, and when I was fortunate enough to have an entire unscheduled weekend to myself at camp, I planted my butt in a chair and I got it done. Finished.
Sure, we’ve had some chilly nights, and the days are noticeably shorter, but summer isn’t quite over yet. We’ll put the hammock away before the next rain, and it may be too cool for the screened porch, but there will still be some afternoons when I’ll find a spot of sun on the deck and sit with my thoughts.
I’ll think about all the things I didn’t do enough of this summer, and vow to do more of them next year. I’ll hear the water pump cycle on and off and fret a bit about getting a new pressure tank. I’ll start to feel that old September, end-of-summer melancholy creeping in. Then I’ll remember that this summer I finished something I started more than sixteen years ago. Something that is really important to me: my first book. Maybe that’s enough.
Shameless self-promotion: Just Like Glass will be published on November 21 by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society, and is available to preorder now.