Last weekend was one of those very summer weekends. A few days that define summer, carve it in your brain like long lines for ice cream at the SnowMan.
We went to the Adirondacks with friends, and while taking my stuff upstairs I had flashes of the few times I'd visited this particular house. This is how old my youngest was then. This is how old the oldest was. I remembered the time we filled the van with apples. The time we went to the stream, and the time we went to the swimming hole.
This list doesn't do justice to the feelings that accompanied the memories. I can't describe my whole life, crammed in those single moments.
One instance, however, presented itself in an almost universal fashion.
I was taking a towel off the railing, and I saw myself doing the same thing long ago. My hand grabbed the towel right there, with the mountains to my left, beyond the meadow and near the sky.
I was checking to see if the towel was dry, and folding it once I saw that it was.
What a common gesture. I saw my mom's hand taking beach towels with sun faded words — BEACH BEACH BEACH — off the rail of the deck at home, off the deck at a house in Rhode Island. I felt a shimmer of connection to anyone caught in the chill of the lake, the stream, the ocean.
That post-swim rapture changing the afternoon's tone to mellow.
Moving my hand was both stop sign and entry. Maybe that is what summer is, a series of stopping moments that open you to time.
What a wonderful, wide-open feeling.
Amy Halloran is a Troy writer. Her website is at http://amyhalloran.net.