Summer is not Simon’s favorite season this year. He is at an age where consistency* and dependability is what he craves and our passive summer schedule is driving him a little nuts. Sure I keep to the same morning and bedtime routines, but we have weeks of travel and then sporadic jolts of summer camp spread throughout our meandering lazy summer. He misses the routine of school and the dependability of his friends there. Lately he has been subtly showing his displeasure by singing a song at the top of his lungs while I am driving. The song is called ‘Boo Hoo! Your Butt Stinks!’ and the clever boy wrote all the lyrics himself.
It doesn’t help that it has been extra blistering hot here. In the still coolness of the mornings I sit on the concrete stoop on the back patio with my coffee and watch the dew sizzle up. The slightly damp smell of dirt mixes with a waft of shampoo from the open bathroom window. Those scents mixed with the inevitable blast of summer sunshine transports me back to summer camp memories. I catch a sliver of that feeling of endless summer, pure and free.
The other morning we were sitting just so. I was watching Tess poke nature into the broken handle of her rocking horsie, filling his blue plastic body with shadowy X-rays of sticks and rocks. Simon was gleeful in the lawn, catching fat, furry bumble bees in his bare hands. Once captured, he’d hold his cupped hands up to his ear and listen to the bumble song while the beating wings ticked his palms softly. Delighted, he’d set one bee free and then make another friend. It is easy to predict the end of this story, easy to imagine the sudden look of shock on Simon’s face that ended the game. With tears blasting down his face he choked out “Why Mama? Why doesn’t that bee love me?” And for the rest of the day, pointing at bees suspiciously saying “I don’t think THAT bee is my friend, Mama.”
Simon has a soft spot in his heart for insects and animals. He is the one who lays on the couch gently stroking our old dog's ear while she sleeps. His ability to squat, still and unmoving, holding a potato bug, is beautiful. His delight (when he notices microscopic baby potato bugs wrapped in the legs of the mama bug) becomes my delight. His tender love for the small creatures of the earth is in such stark contrast to his usual electrified antics that it warms my heart. He never lets a butterfly pass without making us all look at it.
Now then. If you own a canoe and the weather is over 100 degrees and it is a weekend day, then you would be a huge fool not to load the canoe on the top of your car and head to a lake. Which is why we spent last Saturday at Clear Lake on Mt. Hood. On the rocky edge of this lake we spread our quilt and set the umbrella over it. We ate apples and watched the boys swim. Then Simon discovered a tiny, rock colored baby frog, who he immediately fell in love with. I was worried (but not worried enough to get my ass out of the beach chair) that he was going to love the tiny frog to death as it was transported from one bucket of rocks and water to another. Simon begged to take this froggie friend home. You could see straight through his brown eyes into his soul and see that indeed he loved this little frog with every pore of his body. But eventually, on his own volition, he did finally set the frog free in the lake and stood, waving kisses after its pumping legs. Simon is good at loving something and setting it free.
(*Simon likes to strip down and use the hose and a hole of dirt to create the proper consistency. Once properly mixed with sticks, and smeared from head to toe, the CHOCOLATE MONSTER!!!!! is ready for big hugs.)
