Summer

It's hot. Sticky, sweaty, swampy, humidity-like-you-only-get-in-Cleveland hot. The kind of hot that makes me wish summer would just end, already. I've had enough. To top it off Jack was needy today and wanted only to sit in his playroom with one of us, playing dinosaurs, mail, or Wild Things. Sit on the floor, in the hottest little room in the world, and tell us exactly what to do and say. Over and over. Yep. Enough.

But then there is an evening like this one, a sublime evening in that hot summer light, the sidewalk gardens smelling of dry earth and bees and browning leaves, the heady scent of August.

Finally getting out of the hot sticky house and walking to the library with my boy, stopping the stroller so he can hop out and investigate some mushrooms ("Look at dat one, mommy, it's a bigger size! That one looks like a flower!) or step on seed pods scattered on the sidewalks...

Playing at Coventry Park, Corydon making friends left and right, the boy going down the big slide, all on his own. Not just going down it, push-push-pushing with his feet to go faster, this exquisite smile of excitement and pride on his face...

Listening to him giggle and talk and share and play so perfectly with a gorgeous little 2 year old girl at the library, while I browsed for books, and feeling so very proud of how sweet he is. How gentle and funny and silly and kind. I'd play with him anytime...

Stopping for an ice cream cone on the way home, and giving him a quarter to spend at the candy machines ("Look at these bones! Can we get these bones? Can we EAT them???" Best 25 cents ever). Passing our cones back and forth across the table to catch the drips and share, and the boy declaring that the orange sherbet on my cone "tastes like my favorite!"....

And, walking home through our neighborhood again, waving at friends who passed by. The boy is so busy making sense of his world, so interested in who had passed, and where they were going. I told him the names of our neighbors and said they were going home, and he (always sure that everyone he sees is his friend, and ready to play with him) said, "maybe we can play at their house" and I told him that we'd actually played there before, on the 4th, that they'd had the pools out in their yard. A slight pause, and then the boy: "And I rode in the Rocket Car!" Yes, yes you did. And thus began half a block of remembering, Jack filling me in on all sorts of details that he remembered from the day-- riding in the street, the fact that the Rocket car went on Coventry and went fast and had seatbelts too... I am simply amazed by what he remembers and what he connects and what he can talk about. And him. I am simply amazed by him.

It was lovely to have an evening of just him. Just him, me, and summer.