• Compiling a summer reading list.
• Tweaking my weekly schedule to allow for more reading-on-a-chaise and baseball-game-watching time.
• Changing the slipcover on the couch from winter to summer.
• Finding someplace indoors to get a cardio workout. Probably won’t be walking our fitness trail much until October!
• Scheduling a pedicure.
• Checking our hurricane supplies (Tropical Storm Andrea drenched us yesterday).
• Plotting a weekend getaway to the beach with another family.
• Looking for a day game in the Tampa Bay Rays schedule. There’s something so decadent about going to a baseball game in the middle of the week during work hours! 

What about you? Do you find you have a more laid-back state of mind during the summer months? Do you do anything special or different during summer? Please share.

Tomorrow my son starts school again. Tomorrow. The summer days that stretched so alluringly ahead of us are gone—just like that! Though I’ll miss being able to wake up without an alarm clock most days, I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see summer go. That makes me sad, because I used to love summer.

When I was a child in California, summer meant visits to my father and to my grandparents’ 22-acre farm. It meant trips to the beach with my friends, tennis team practice, and frozen yogurt at the Cow Palace. It meant listening to music (records! on a turntable!) for hours, reading while lying on the couch and the occasional Dodger game. These were summer rituals I looked forward to all year.

Now that I live in Florida, I don’t love summer anymore. Summer now means trying not to suffocate in the humidity, and, as an adult, there is little lessening of my normal responsibilities. Still, I do have some summer rituals that I enjoy and that help me make it through the hot months:

Family vacation to a rented lake house in Georgia.

Sunday afternoons by—and in—the pool. When you’re wet, it’s almost comfortable to be outside. I take the Sunday paper and my crossword puzzle book out with me.


Tampa Bay Rays baseball game. They play in an air conditioned dome!


Reading a writer’s biography. This year it was Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. In previous years I’ve read about Louisa May Alcott and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Reading a “classic.” Summer really does have a more relaxed feel…perfect for slowly digesting a classic piece of fiction. I haven’t done this yet, but I can still get started before summer ends. Any recommendations for a readable classic?

Movies as a family. This is harder and harder to do with a 16-almost-17-year-old, but we all wanted to finish the Harry Potter saga together.

Pedicures. What with all the bare feet and sandal wearing, every summer I like to get at least one pedicure. It feels so luxurious to have someone paint my toenails!


I hope your summer has been full of long, lazy days, cool drinks and relaxed explorations. I’m always looking for more ways to make summer fun, so—what are your favorite summer rituals?

So how are you? I’ve missed my blog friends these past two weeks, so I thought I’d check in and see how you’re all doing. Me, well, I’m fine but it’s been interesting…

We took our yearly trip to the lake house with one significant change: we brought with us five of our son’s teenage friends…I know, I know, what were we thinking? We had two other adults to supervise along with my husband and myself, so we were only slightly outnumbered.

This year instead of the Clampett Mobile, we had “The Cadillac” and “The Ferrari.”  The kids spent most of the week tooling around on the two personal watercraft, pulling each other on an inner tube or a wake board. When they weren’t playing XBox or watching Comedy Central. Or eating. Other than a yellow jacket attack the first day, all went well—no serious injuries (thank goodness) and everyone is still friends. Even my husband and I.

I’ve been doing some reading (see reading challenge page for updates) and writing (a series of articles for a website that’s about to launch) and I’ve also unfortunately been spending some time at the vet’s office. Scout has been under the weather, and we haven’t quite figured out the whole story. She’s been looking and acting pretty pitiful but she’s on some medication now that I hope will do the trick. There is nothing like the face of a dog who doesn’t feel well. She’s always been pretty healthy so we’re all a bit stressed out right now.

I don't feel so good...

But the sun is shining and the AC is working and life is generally good, despite the occasional hiccup.

How is your summer going?

Shish kebab on the grill

When I tired of galloping through the pasture, I swam in the irrigation ditch that ran behind Grandma’s house like my own personal river, caught frogs for frog swimming races, or stretched out on a beach towel on the wooden bridge that crossed the ditch, baking myself in the summer sun. Or I would read in a lawn chair under the huge oak in the front yard, listening to the soothing sound of chickens softly clucking while they searched a flower bed for tasty bugs. Occasionally, the rooster’s crow broke the quiet of the afternoon.


Grandma was a great cook and I ate slabs of her homemade bread covered in fresh butter or homemade jam all day long. I reveled in peaches and watermelon purchased from local produce stands, or plums picked right off the tree. For a special treat, sometimes Grandma would make boysenberry cobbler, the purple berries oozing juices through the crumbly top crust.

Grandma’s mother, Great Gram, lived across the street in a tiny, pink house and many evenings I’d go play Rummy with her. (One of my first lessons in sportsmanship came at the card table: You can’t play cards with the grown ups if you cry when you lose.) I loved to play cards with her, but I admit to an ulterior motive as well. She made the best milkshakes I’ve ever had. She’d pour canned Hershey’s syrup over several scoops of chocolate chip ice cream and icy milk, then mush up the whole concoction with an old-fashioned egg beater. It was so thick, I had to eat it with a spoon.

My mom and step dad live in the house with the red trim now. Sadly, we don’t get to visit very often, since we live 2500 miles away. But when we do make the trip to Cottonwood, I’m reminded that I was once a girl with no cares, running wild through a cow pasture and slurping up milkshakes without a thought of their calorie count.