Summer Is Something We Have to MakeEvery summer, I find myself longing for a feeling that seems increasingly difficult to reach.It’s the feeling of being twelve years old, waking up with nowhere to be. The only thing on the agenda was finishing a chapter of your summer book before heading to the neighborhood pool. Long afternoons stretched endlessly ahead. Time felt abundant. Days unfolded slowly.
As an adult, I often catch myself aching for those summers again.
But recently, I realized something: those days aren’t coming back on their own. If I want that feeling of slowness, I have to create it.
This past weekend, I carved out a few days with family and escaped to the Shenandoah. There was no itinerary beyond hiking trails, sitting by the river, throwing sticks for my dog, and reading. I picked up The Awakening, a book I loved in high school but hadn’t touched in nearly twenty years.
Reading it now felt entirely different.
Twenty years of love, heartbreak, grief, mistakes, growth, and becoming have changed the way I see the world—and the books I once read. Passages that felt distant at sixteen suddenly felt deeply familiar. Characters I once judged, I now understood.
Summer Is Something We Have to Make
Every summer, I find myself longing for a feeling that seems increasingly difficult to reach.
It’s the feeling of being twelve years old, waking up with nowhere to be. The only thing on the agenda was finishing a chapter of your summer book before heading to the neighborhood pool. Long afternoons stretched endlessly ahead. Time felt abundant. Days unfolded slowly.
As an adult, I often catch myself aching for those summers again.
But recently, I realized something: those days aren’t coming back on their own. If I want that feeling of slowness, I have to create it.
This past weekend, I carved out a few days with family and escaped to the Shenandoah. There was no itinerary beyond hiking trails, sitting by the river, throwing sticks for my dog, and reading. I picked up The Awakening, a book I loved in high school but hadn’t touched in nearly twenty years.
Reading it now felt entirely different.
Twenty years of love, heartbreak, grief, mistakes, growth, and becoming have changed the way I see the world—and the books I once read. Passages that felt distant at sixteen suddenly felt deeply familiar. Characters I once judged, I now understood.
What struck me most was that I had completely forgotten how much of the novel takes place during slow summer days. Set in late 1800s New Orleans, it’s filled with long afternoons, quiet observations, and a gradual unfolding of self-discovery. Somehow, it mirrored exactly what I had been searching for.
There was something unexpectedly healing about revisiting a book from a season of life when time moved more slowly. It reminded me that slowness isn’t something we stumble into anymore. It’s something we choose.
The older I get, the more it feels like there are never enough hours in the day. Yet for a few days in the mountains, with a river nearby and a familiar book in my lap, time softened. The world felt a little quieter.
Summer, I’ve realized, isn’t just a season. It’s an invitation.
An invitation to leave some space on the calendar. To reread an old favorite. To spend an afternoon outside without optimizing it. To remember that some of life’s most meaningful moments happen when nothing much is happening at all. The summers we miss may not exist anymore. But we can still make room for the feeling of them.
Without even realizing it, I’ve spent years painting the feeling of summer. When I look across my body of work, I see a celebration of life’s quieter joys: lingering over a game night, getting lost in a book on a warm afternoon, running barefoot through a field of wildflowers. It’s a reminder that the moments we often overlook are the very ones that make life beautiful.
