It's always sunny
My memories of summer revolve around what everything revolves around: the sun.
There is something about the quality of the sunlight in the summer months—its long slants as it dips westernly, the way it sparkles in the morning full of promise of good days ahead.
Mine is a love-hate relationship with the sun. As a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, I burn like nobody’s business and have a family history of skin cancer to boot. But the sunshine is what makes summer...well, summer. It is especially poignant to consider it now, in the dead of winter, when the days are dreary and short, and the sun dips below the horizon before I’ve even had a chance to take a deep breath after the work day is through.
When I was in Morocco, we talked with some Canadian girls at one of our hostels, one of whom assured us that an excursion to the desert was not to be missed. She said they even saw the sun rise! She had never seen a sunrise before. What?! Was an opinion from someone who’s never seen the sun rise one to be trusted? Probably not.*
My earliest memories of summer shift between several locales from my childhood: Bethany Beach, Delaware; upstate New York; and Long Island.
East coasters that we were, we would head to our beachside mecca yearly with our family friends—their beach house in Bethany was a constant of my childhood summers. My sisters and I would walk up before dawn, slip out of our downstairs bunk beds, and head out to the cool sand to watch the sun rise, a pink orb floating up over the ocean. We’d get back in bed, then wake up at a more reasonable hour to frivol away our days in the water or sipping orangeade downtown. Days on the beach bring back the sunny associations of summer: slathering on sunscreen and slathering on more after we dried off from our swimming and crashing through the waves.
In Upstate New York, we’d hoe pumpkins in between adventures on my grandparents’ farm. It was always tricky knowing how to dress—the morning air was the slightest bit chilly, but as soon as the sun came up, you’d regret a choice of long sleeves. We’d hoe pumpkins from the dim early morn until mid-afternoon, the sun high above our heads. Squinting our eyes to spot the end of the row, the sun was relentless. We’d toss the bottle of sunscreen down the row for when we’d need it later, though with each application, we’d grow considerably grimier with another layer of dirt blent in. The rest of our daylight hours would be spent in the treehouse, clambering up the creek behind Ariel’s house, or picking wildflowers to make daisy chains. The sun always seemed like a friend in the afternoons, after it was no longer ticking away the slow hours until we’d be done hoeing.
On Long Island, our days and weeks were spent with cousins running out of doors, climbing trees, making trips to the library, the ice cream shop, the Red Deli—wherever our bikes or our feet or our wagon would take us. The sun, again, plays prominently on this summer stage. My worst sunburn in memory happened at 418 Smith Avenue. We swam in the pool for the entire day (possibly taking a couple of breaks to eat a popsicle or two). At my young age, I was in no place to be responsible for my own sunscreen application and didn’t think twice until we went inside that night. Already my backside was tender and red as a lobster. I spent the week sleeping on my stomach, aloe vera plastering my t-shirt painfully to my skin. Never again! And yet, every year, I usually end up with one bad sunburn before I sufficiently wisen up.
Away from the peer pressures and opinions of high school, I’ve come to embrace my ivory skin, donning a wide-brimmed sunhat at the pool and setting a timer to go off every two hours during my mountain hikes so goodness knows I won’t forget to reapply my SPF 50. And so my love-hate relationship with the sun has muted into one of mutual understanding; Vive l’été!
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*writer's note (these are the kinds of things we talk about in our writing club): I can't tell if this makes sense here; I was drawing a comparison of sorts between this girl who'd NEVER SEEN THE SUN RISE and my earliest memories of summer, watching sunrises on the beach. There's probably a better way to connect these ideas but it's late and I'm playing catch-up :)
