End of Summer
Once the pool heater breaks, you know it's over.
By Juyun
“The pool guy is coming to look at it this afternoon. It’s gonna be $300,” my husband says with a scowl on his face as he looks at the estimate.
I nod. “Well, it has to be done, right?”
He grumbles and places leftover pasta in front of our daughter who says “I love spicy, Mama!” over, and over, as if it’s the most exciting revelation of the day.
The clouds hang low outside our window.
When I was a kid summer was a distant land that I’d get to eventually.
And it wasn’t something I preferred much, to school either. Especially not as a teacher’s pet with built in validation 9-months of the year.
For me, summer meant gorging on microwave food (Michelina’s pasta), and watching bad TV like Rikki Lake, while my parents worked.
They always worked extremely hard and of course, summer was no exception.
Now, left to fend for ourselves in a house that was stocked with plenty of everything edible and woefully devoid of stimulating activity, I’d nuke my 3rd helping of 360 calorie pasta for the afternoon (yes, I was a chubby 5th grader) and settle in to eat it on my bed before taking a lap around the house and reading a few pages of Goosebumps.
The best part of the day was projecting myself into some dire situation where I would be the clever hero who figured out why the ghosts were haunting us, what they wanted and how to scare the monsters back to their lair.
Then, two weeks before the official return to school, I curated my school supplies, placing my new binder covered in a mature corduroy, in my new backpack (Jansport, of course, maybe Kipling), and my new pens and pencils decorated with cute Korean characters into a quilted pink pencil case, and packing it away in the front packet.
I’d imagine myself coming in to 5th grade more sophisticated and less chubby, maybe even smarter and prettier since after all I had read about six Goosebumps books over the summer.
Now, as a 40-something with two little girls I live through them as they speculate which kids will be in their new class, will their teacher be nice? Will they learn a lot?
And I wonder in awe, how I could have taken such poignant moments of youth, beauty, and novelty, for granted.
The end of summer is always for me, the end of anticipation for the year (true? yes. sad? maybe).