Every June, before school ends for the summer, I tape a large stretch of paper to the wall, uncap a few colored pens, turn to my girls and say “Go”. Our summer bucket list has grown over the years. While it’s always included things like “play in the sprinklers” and “catch lightening bugs”, we’ve added more and more trips. Last summer, I spent one weekend at home. One.
Living 300 miles from my family means visits are few and far between. I’ve been fortunate enough to stay weeks with my parents during the kids’ summer vacations. We’ve visited Hershey Park and Great Wolf Lodge and Washington, DC, not to mention day trips to the Jersey shore or weekend visits to my in-laws’ beach condo in Delaware.
Growing up in Southwest Virginia, my summers were far less exciting. The highlight was a week or two on Edisto Island, South Carolina. Island commerce consisted of a gas station, a Piggy Wiggly, and enterprising locals selling everything from shrimp to seagrass baskets. With so little “to do”, we spent hours combing the beach for shells and playing board games. My nana would bake something involving pie dough, rolling it out with a floured bottle of Absolut because the cottage didn’t have a rolling pin. We ate forbidden surgery cereal with food dyes that sent my ADHD brother pinging off the walls. We walked the beach under a big palmetto moon long past our usual bedtime and snaked through the tidal creeks in boats of varying sizes.
It was magical.
My brother and I would spend weeks “preparing our feet” for hot sand and broken shells. We’d traverse the concrete sidewalk between our back door and the shed, over and over, hoping to form a tough layer of skin on the soles of our feet. That was how we entertained ourselves. Saying “I’m bored” was akin to letting loose a curse word in my family. It simply wasn’t allowed.
“Go make your own fun,” my mom would say. And we did.
As I got older, I began to resent the yearly trip to the island. Edisto is one of the most beautiful and peaceful places on earth, which is great if you’re looking to get away from the stresses of life, a bit less ideal if you’re a teen with only an annoying older brother for company. I wanted to see the world. I got my passport at 16 and spent the summer in a German village with a host family. I kept travelling, a restlessness fueling trip after trip until I had children. Our adventures became smaller with babies in our lives, but once everyone could pee in a potty and sleep through the night, we were off.
Sometimes I worried we entertained the kids too much. There’s something to be said for boredom. I wouldn’t be writing this today if my mom hadn’t sent me to my room with the directive to “make my own fun” after I uttered the “B” word a few too many times. Writing was, and continues to be, a way to entertain myself. I can also wait anywhere for any period of time as long as I have ample reading material.
My husband’s New Jersey childhood mirrors that of our girls. He once paced miles at an airport when our flight was delayed while I happily read a book from start to finish. To this day, he complains of the five hours he wasted in the Miami airport. I remember it as the time I read the Da Vinci Code.
This summer was supposed to be our most epic bucket list yet. We trekked to the passport office in February in preparation for our first international trip in July. (Ok, it was Canada, and we were driving, but it required a border crossing, so I’m counting it). The girls’ passports arrived the day after everything shut down in March.
I managed isolation fairly well in the spring. We marveled at the nest of eggs inside the wreath on our front porch. We tackled e-learning and online grocery ordering and kept the boredom at bay. We painted a room. We baked. We watched a shit ton of TV. With dental offices closed, my husband couldn’t work, and we had more time together as a family.
The weeks stretched into months. We cancelled one trip and then another. With so much suffering in the world, mourning a vacation felt wrong.
It still hurt. It still does.
Summer is my favorite season, a time filled will excitement and adventure— but not this year. I fear the pandemic is only beginning. My husband spends his days in full protective gear and returns to us each evening with deeps lines on his face as a reminder of everything he may have been exposed to that day. He leaves his shoes and clothes in the garage and takes a shower before he holds us. I pray each night it’s enough to keep us safe.
We isolate to minimize our risk of contracting the virus or passing it on to others. There will be no trips to Canada or DC or even Virginia.
I may not see my family again until 2021.
My brother has called more in the past months than in years of our adulthood. In some ways, this experience feels eerily similar to the tedious summers of our youth.
This year, as school drew to a close, we didn’t write a summer bucket list. Weeks before, when the boredom began to set in, my girls, with no guidance from me, tacked a list to the wall of activities they could do without leaving the house or yard: Make slime, Hide and Seek, Write a story…
They had learned to make their own fun. It may not be what we planned, but I wonder if they will look back on this summer of simplicity like I do those afternoons of crossing hot concrete in my bare feet: A painful, but necessary toughing of skin before something magical. Or maybe, the magic, like those long days on Edisto, comes with slowing down, improvising, and spending time together. At the very least, they have a list waiting when they start dropping B-bombs.
Kathryn Hively
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As a kid, my mom had a list of cleaning tasks that she would whip out anytime I said I was bored. I usually only said it once at the beginning of summer, and learned quickly to entertain myself for the rest of the time. I love that your girls too the initiative to make a list of things they could do at home. I think this staying at home time will be a grand learning experience for those of us who are used to bigger adventures.