21-07-2025
Wildfires, EEE, rainy weekends. What happened to summer?
I pull it off, inspect it, Google it, and learn it's a 'seed tick' in its larval stage of life. I flick it outside, and we decide to spend the rest of the day inside. It's hot out there anyhow!
And if it's not hot, it's weirdly cold, or humid or raining for
But we need that jerk.
Maybe it's that steady march of time wearing down our mortal vessels, or maybe it's environmental calamities or the scheduling of endless activities, but summer does feel like it's picking up speed. My family is still in the toddler phase, meaning we're not yet into pre-professional athletics. But even without sports camps or travel teams, we're booked until mid-August.
Our calendar looks like a battle map, packed with blue arrows and red boxes and orange troop formations. Notes about in-law arrival and departure times, a number for that company I need to call about that thing. A far cry from the summers of my youth, when the same months were a carefree canvas to fill with bike riding, video gaming, and landscaping. OK maybe not that carefree, but one thing we definitely didn't worry about:
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At least there's the beach! After we slather on sunscreen and bug repellant and strap on the oxygen mask, we can swim!
You already know: more than
cyanobacteri-ers?
If you're thinking, 'Enough with the doom and the gloom and the spores!' . . . I get it.
But all this invites a few questions:
Are the high alerts making summer speed past?
Are the threats valid?
Are we over scheduling our summers because we're constantly comparing our summers to other people's?
No, yeah, and probably.
Since 1990,
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It's easy to blame social media and someone else in general for the feeling our summer is disappearing. Indoor downtime can turn into envy moments when we compare our lives and summers to our friend's trip to Greece, Miami, or Scituate. We're fed constant updates on wars and tariffs and the on-again-off-again romance between Truth Social Guy and X-Man.
Every summer, we're back here, though, bemoaning the brevity. This was our summer! This was me time!
I entered June like a tornado, ripping through house projects to get stuff finished before we welcomed baby number three. Then we had the baby on June 30th, and we have been forced to move at the speed of a newborn.
Slowing down has made me realize we need that jerk reminding us that
the end is near
— the end of the summer anyway. If you're scared to miss something, it makes you appreciate it that much more. If we were all immortal or lived in Florida, who would care that Labor Day had come and gone?
New Englanders know the season is fleeting. We feel November in the chill of the freezer aisle, and think of icy January when we're fixing that crack in the foundation. That's why it feels short: because we want summer to last.
It helps to focus on what you can control.
I can control this: When my kid believes with his entire heart that the Blue Line is the fastest of all the lines, we drive to the Wood Island stop and take the train to Wonderland station (whose name makes it the biggest let down for a child in all of Massachusetts) then walk to Revere Beach. The sun is shining, the water is frigid, a classic summer day.
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And not a tick in sight.
Bart Tocci is a Boston-based writer. Send comments to magazine@
