Flat Stanley Tomatoes and Optimal Speedo Coverage — August 2024
August, once a month of idle heat, is now a hot press.
This, all of this, used to be contained within early September, but September bursts backwards now and here. Now August is a month of asynchronicity, denial, and frenzy, trying to be all things in the moment and in preparation. In that way, it is motherhood, it is a career, there’s never enough, we’re doing it wrong, something always gives as the calendar never ceases demanding and trying to suffocate not just with heat but with anticipation.
I no longer irritatingly wax nostalgic about starting school the Tuesday after Labor Day. They don’t need to hear that when it’s 96 degrees when I pick them up after the first day and the twins’ August birthday is lost in the whirlwind of first days of school and its adjustments and expectations.
I don’t tell them about pouring over the back-to-school issue of Seventeen with its plaid skirts and matching heathered sweater and knee socks if you were into that preppy thing.
And in 2024, I fought hard to go with it. Be in the moment and be utterly prepared for the deluge of emails that ask in some sort of wide-eyed incredulity “Can you BELIEVE it’s back to school? Can you BELIEVE we’re almost, nearly, sort of at the beginning of the end of August?”
Can you BELIEVE life is grabbing you by the shoulders and spinning you like it’s your turn at Pin-the-Tail on the Donkey? And yes, you’re blindfolded. And yes, you’re probably also the donkey?
Yes. I can. And still, I am astonished.
Which is why:
- We went for more celebratory scoops of ice cream than I can say without shame to mark sweet (sometimes gleeful) goodbyes and tentative hellos.
- I picked up knitting again, unsure if it’s to mark days, to leave a little something behind, or just enjoy irregular and occasionally ill-fitting accessories. Still, the repetition allows for bursts of creative energy and a renewed supply of cuss words, both well-established and original. (Thanks, Accidental Creative).
- I’m excited to be writing reviews on Reedsy, and why I’ve been waiting for the kids to go back to school to begin.
- Opportunities have to present themselves before I realize I want them.
- My husband and I became experts on things like “over-rotation” and “shotput form” and “optimal coverage levels for Speedos” from our very comfortable couch while we watched the Olympics.
- My family played too many games of poker and laughed to tears when one child played several hands without even looking at his cards. And won.
- We bent the rules of Scrabble a bit, leading the never-to-be-topped, entirely gonzo playing of “oabunwad.”
- I’ve let go (almost) of the stress of packing for vacation, releasing the need to compensate for the time both boys, much younger, forgot to pack pants. Or the year I left the swim bag at home, the one with the suits they’d actually remembered to pack.
- This was the Year of the Traveling Tomato, so labeled because we’d purchased a tomato, a perfect specimen, before our annual end-of-summer trip. We didn’t eat it, so we brought it along, where it sat, untouched, only to be brought home again — sort of juicy, red, hard-to-mail Flat Stanley that didn’t go anywhere. Which makes it nothing like Flat Stanley, I suppose.
- I will always keep the playlists we make every year for this same trip, although I may quietly remove my husband’s choice of a rousing version of “I’m A Little Teapot.”
- When, on the beach, my son, taller than me, called out to me in his deep voice, “Mom! Watch me throw!” as he played frisbee with his father, I lived every parenting moment ever in that second. Past, present, future.
- My heart struggled to find rhythm again when they went back to school, just as three months earlier my brain struggled to find a rhythm when they finished school. No fear, though, because we got a call from the school nurse about 0.3 seconds after school started.
- I am overwhelmed and underwhelmed.
- There will be no counting of how many summers like this remain. Here, things will always be counted in empty ice cream cups.
Here are some splashes of marvelous from August, 2024
Great commercial or greatest commercial of all time?
This was recommended by a few writers/bloggers/essayists in recent weeks. For good reason.
A powerful essay on losing friendships.
No more cicadas.
It doesn’t take much to say everything.
Like most subscribers, I am a little (so very much) behind in my New Yorker reading. I just got around to the July 21 edition. This story is unbelievably good.
And finally, look, Spotify surprises me every once in a while and this popped up and now every morning I’m “ba ba ba BA ba BA babababa!” and I can no longer just look out a window and think my thoughts:
What delights popped up for you this month?
