Illustration by Molly Zhou
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On a recent Sunday spent on the backyard patio with friends and neighbours, my two-year-old daughter, Mimi, wore no pants. My son, Ezra, and his pal snuck inside to put an entire container of hair gel in their hair while the adults weren’t looking. And no one cared because under a big blue sky, it was the feeling of summer.
Because summer, really, isn’t a season. It’s a feeling. (Anyone know how to bottle it?)
There’s something unhurried about summer. Mornings melt into lazy afternoons into long summer nights. It’s a feeling I saw on a T-shirt last week: “the faster I go, the behinder I get.” If that’s the case, why rush in the first place?
It’s a feeling our younger selves knew well, without even realizing it. To be bored. To have no sense of whether it was a Tuesday or Sunday. A pairing that fuelled imaginative summer days. Imaginations that carried us to faraway places on our bikes, into the wooded trees out back, sprawled in the grass. Nary a cellphone in sight. The pull of social media was replaced by that of daydreaming. It’s easy to forget how big the imagination can be when it’s not confined to the four corners of a screen. Curiosity then was limited only by the approximate time your mom wanted you home for dinner.
How do I find my way back to that childhood summer? As a millennial who is now all grown up, I open my phone and social media tries to persuade me that summer has become one of #eurosummer. But that’s not the season I know or remember.
If it’s the Canadian in me, I am happy to say so. Why would we travel across the globe in the summer when the best place on Earth is our own backyard?
The Canadian way of summer is to get outside. All the time. To seek out water and sand in close proximity. A lake, river, pool or sprinkler. Retreat to cottages and cabins within driving distance. Let hot days melt away with neighbours, family and friends. We exist for those moments, letting them linger way past bedtime. Life slows. Important emails drafted after noon on a Friday wait until Monday because everyone quietly agreed the weekend started at lunch. The hot weather beckons a slower pace. Slowness invites leisure. And while a leisurely weekend outside certainly isn’t exclusive to the geography of Canada, it does feel indicative of it.
It’s not performative either. Summer is the riverbank where you’ve parked your cooler and beach chair for the day. The varieties of herbs growing in your garden pots. The sunset that takes up the entire sky. The old oversized college sweatshirt reserved exclusively for campfires. The hair clip you keep close by, not because Pinterest told you to, but because eventually you’ll need to pull your hair off your neck. The lightweight dress you reach for because anything more feels like too much. Summer things that are there only for you.
Not every summer gets to be this way. Some fill quickly with weddings, family reunions and plans, plans, plans. So when an unhurried summer finds you, hang onto it. Because by the time you find time to be bored, we’ll be rounding the bend on autumn.
This kind of summertime non-discipline discipline requires some groundwork. The art of leisure requires accepting that not every moment needs a purpose, not every hobby a result. It means a sunny day takes precedent over routine. Dinner preparation abandoned for the last-minute invitation or the patio call.
It also means tossing your phone into the aforementioned body of water, only for the tide to wash it back ashore come fall. After all, how can we perfect the art of leisure if we keep looking down, searching for the bottom of a bottomless scroll? Must look up! Must wear sunglasses! It’s so bright out there. Most of all, I must be deliberate, at least at first, until the ease of summer settles in.
The key to my own long, hot, unhurried summer will be to find myself happily out of touch. Everything I need can be found right in my own backyard.
Jordyn Sharfe lives in Saskatoon.