WELCOME
SUMMER LOVIN’ HAPPENED SO FAST
Posted 08.11.08 by annajohnson
Summer is challenging for many a Yummy. The fake tan is dribbling down the back of your legs. The brie is gently decomposing in the picnic basket. Your offspring wants to get to a playground in brain melting heat and museums - with their icy stillness - close at 5pm. Well that’s what it is like for an urban mum like me.
Lugging bags of fresh figs and limes off the handle bars of my war torn Maclaren, letting watermelon seeds fly all over the bed and listening to music throb up off the sidewalks we feel liberated in the big city and sometimes just tad confined. If you don’t cavort with the beach house set you need to be creative. Maddeningly so.
We trek to the Brooklyn Public Library to thumb through magazines. We look at plants in the green house of the Botanical Gardens. We splash water on chalk and make melty rainbows near the stoop outside the house. We talk to our potted flowers begging them to survive for a few more weeks. We dance to OHIO by Neil Young, over and over again because Marcello is a natural born revolutionary and, then by 9pm we begin the restless passage into morning, because no-one in this house really sleeps. Like a wary pride of lions we sniff for a breeze that rarely comes and listen for predatory noises in the night. It reminds me of the summers in the seventies when my parents would walk us through Greenwich Village at midnight or stop in Washington Square to listen to street musicians. I always felt so lucky to be allowed to be awake. Weary and smelling of incense, we would return in the coolest hours through emptying streets, so grateful to break from the monotony of heat encased inside four loft walls. In India families sleep on the roof in summer, with just a sheet between them and the stars. I often dream of this in August.
Then respite comes. One weekend my lovely friend Suzanne invited us to her house upstate. Marcello was shocked by the space. The enormity of the sky unhindered by architecture. The children’s book barn. It was like watching a zoo bear take its first steps into natural habitat. At first my little cub clung to the edges of the deck and then he went further and further spreading like the concentric ripples of a pool to the very edges of a cornfield. I felt so proud and terrified, city children look so small in nature.
And we celebrated his third birthday in a beautiful country kitchen, picked play dough off the deck, rolled in the grass and forgot the subway for a patch in time. The bliss! Sweaty half naked boys running screaming in the sun. Forging freindships that might only last a day. A sense of joy that makes you feel nostalgia for the moment while you are already living and the smell of grass and sun in your hair. I caught a train to the tip of Long Island: Montauk for three hours (one way) to get that feeling back.
On days with less time we settle for Coney Island. It really is all good.
Most mothers move mountains (and ignore debts) to make this sort of magic happen and in summer it feels like a mammoth effort. We don’t have a car. I can’t drive anyway! Tomorrow Marcello will rouse from his nap and want to catch three trains uptown to see the Penguins at Central Park Zoo. We’ll probably get there just on closing time and the ride home will take too long. The Friday commuters won’t be smiling. But it is his third summer on earth and wherever we are I want to make it paradise.
Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.
XXX ANNA
wendy Says:
August 27th, 2008 at 2:34 pmGreetings from Sydney!
You make summer in New York sound so alluring, my heart fluttered and I truly missed it for just a moment. What a fabulous place to have a little one, you really do see it through new eyes.