Summer of Journeys

Summer's promise of long, light-filled days of leisure can be thwarted by vacations, camps, appointments, lessons, programs, and other time-seeking missives.

Before I knew it, what I thought would be an endless June was supplanted by what my heart imagines will be a long, lazy July. Yet my mind counters that soon July will meet June's fate, succumbing to August's litany of last-minutes and back-to-schools.

And then it will be over.

The summer of my son's 11th year, and my daughters' 10th, will vanish. And once this one's gone, I'll have scant few left before summer jobs, college road trips, and girlfriends/boyfriends usurp their summers.

But - I argue with myself - the camps are important for expanding their horizons and allowing them to venture out on their own within a safely managed environment. The vacations allow us to live a little differently for a while, somewhere else. The academic lessons are essential to stem the "brain drain" that would otherwise occur. The athletic and music programs help them to develop the discipline to meet a challenge and to find enjoyment in reaching goals. And the appointments are just conveniently scheduled in the summer to reduce the time they must be pulled out of school.

Yet, amid all these need-to-squeeze-ins, the journeys of the planned sort, it's really the unanticipated journeys that give us pleasure. They make us smile, they give us stories to tell, and they're what we'll remember about the summer of 2009.

{What unanticipated journeys, you may wonder? I could tell. And I thought of telling. But they'd get lost in translation. So I'll keep them in the Peet family memory vault, to be resurrected around future dinner tables. And for those difficult moments, after the kids have left home for good, when it will help to recall those times when they were young and all mine.}

Suffice to say we've felt the joy of some of these unplanned journeys this summer thus far - and many this week alone. I know that you are also enjoying some unanticipated summer journeys of your own. And that some will be shared, but others will be safely stored in your memory vault, to be recalled later. You don't have to share them all.

Simply enjoy the summer journeys of 2009!