Seize summer with the spirit of children

Standing waist deep in the river, waving our fly rods under a perfect blue sky, we were a couple of temporary escapees from the responsibilities of work and family.

The summer we’d waited for so long had finally arrived, no matter what the calendar said. For that moment, it was as if we both had been handed an exquisite gift, an unexpected reward for all we had endured over the last several months of cold and darkness and cabin fever.

“Well, we’d better enjoy this while it lasts,” said the fisherman, gazing across the shimmering water to a stand of white birches on the opposite bank. “Next thing you know, it’ll be July Fourth, and the summer will be half over.”

I wanted to push the guy into the river and watch him float away. What a ridiculously adult kind of comment to make, I thought – so full of harsh reality, so inescapably true, that I could almost feel the air grow chillier as a cloud passed in front of the sun.

The Memorial Day weekend had barely ended, the splendid warm months were just beginning to unfold, and all he could do was dwell on how brief all this beauty really was, how painfully finite.

I thought about his familiar lament the other day as I drove near a city park where a group of kids was playing. As I sat in the car and watched them for a while, I realized that only the very young know how to enjoy the gift of summer the way it should be enjoyed.

The four little kids simply lay on their backs, their arms outstretched, their smiling faces to the sun, and let summer wash over them in all its glory. Theirs was a complete escape, a total and uninhibited surrender to this most magical time of the year. None of them, I was certain, would have even thought to ruin the moment by subjecting such a treasure as a summer day to the limitations imposed by the pages of a calendar or the fleeting hands of the clock.

July Fourth would reach them in its own sweet time. Until then, it was a day for idle dreams.

For those fortunate youngsters, summer truly did represent everything that was good in life. It was a time when some of their best memories would be made, memories they would cherish later, although they could never know that now.

And their days would go on and on so long that, years later, when they were all grown up and no longer capable of succumbing completely to this season’s warm embrace as they had in childhood, they would be left to remember wistfully when the world was bright and new and every summer was an entire lifetime unto itself.

I closed my eyes and tried to recapture that feeling again, the feelings the kids were reveling in on the grass, but it wouldn’t come easily. A hundred responsibilities intruded. There were chores to be done, calls to make, deadlines to meet. And it would be like that nearly every day throughout the summer, for all of us adults who allow ourselves to lose that capacity to appreciate the exhilarating release that the season once lavished on us so generously as kids.

Instead, we tend to schedule our summer pleasures so precisely now that we wind up wishing away many of the precious days between weekends, or the time leading up to the big family vacation, as if they were somehow extraneous.

Summer never changes, but we do.

“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,” said Henry James, a man who never let himself forget the joys of the season.

Nor did Walt Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” contains the celebratory lines:

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease,

Observing a spear of summer grass.

Not a bad way to enjoy a summer’s afternoon, as any kid would tell you.