Running a lemonade stand with my buds, playing soccer in the warm air, running around the backyard in oversized army surplus gear, imagining danger all around me — my favorite memories always happened during summer. I looked forward to that three month stretch of freedom from the first day of school. It represented a relief from the obligation of public school and a shot at freedom outside its tyrannical walls.
Having a season without responsibility may be one of the few favors that public school actually did me. It instilled the idea that if you work hard through the tedious stuff, you get to a place of choice.
Summer meant the beginning of friends, sleep and maybe even a sunny day or two. An event so infrequent in Portland that even the most pale-skinned resident has to appreciate the rare warmth for what it is.
As I grew up, the lemonade stand disappeared and the army surplus gear fit smaller and smaller. But year after year, no matter how difficult school and the social complications it comes with became, I could look forward to those three months.
This summer I’ll be staying in Eugene. Between summer classes and three jobs, I’ll be spending a lot of time in stuffy rooms. Not the ideal summer of my youth. It’s strange having to remind myself that I’m not about to step out of responsibility. I’m taking on more, in fact.
I spent last summer with my family in Portland. Although I’d been away in Eugene for a year, I came back and it felt like any other summer: same friends, same family, same city. But things were different when I left for Eugene again. I felt like I wasn’t leaving home, but heading towards it.
As my sophomore year of college drew to a close last week, I began to realize what that shift really meant. I caught myself with that familiar eager feeling that has always come with the end of a school year. But this summer is different.
The worn out words of my Midwestern family rang in my ears: Be ambitious, work hard, put food on the table. There was never much downtime in my family.
I haven’t thought of myself as a child in a long time, but these worried feelings about my loss of freedom gave me that sense. The sense that I am still young, but that I’m about to leave that part of my life far behind and trade it for one buried in bank accounts and internships.
It took the loss of my traditional summer to realize that, in a way that feels inevitable, I’m becoming an adult.
I struggled with this disconcerting concept for a while. But I came to a new conclusion.
Those summers when I was a kid meant so much not because school was out. They were important because they represented earning the right to choose how I spend my time. Time I could use to be around the people I love, doing the things I wanted to be doing. That freedom hasn’t changed, how I use it has.
I realized that no one forced me into an office this summer. It isn’t out of any sense of obligation. It’s because I like the work I do and the people I do it with.
The days are still going to be sunny (sometimes).
I’m still going to be with people I love — they’re just different people.
There isn’t any loss here, only change.
It isn’t that my childhood freedom is going away. But rather that, like every summer past, it’s growing up with me.