The Week the House Changes
The quiet ways we invite Summer into our home.
There is a framed wooden sign I keep packed away for most of the year. I don’t really do word decor — if you’ve spent any time here you know I’d rather have a bloom or a well-placed candle than something that spells out a sentiment. But every Summer, this particular sign comes back out. It leans somewhere in the kitchen, usually near the flowers I’ve switched to hot pink peonies in a blue striped pot for the season. The words on it read like a list someone jotted down when they were feeling particularly fond of the season: pool days, sunshine, ice cream, warm nights, fireworks, barbeques, boat rides, bonfires, family and friends.
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Elin Hilderbrand The Rumor
It comes out because we have kids in the house. And because Summer, when you have kids, earns it.
The sign isn’t the only thing that moves. There’s a navy nautical basket that comes out the same week — the one that spends the rest of the year tucked away. During the Summer, it lives on the kitchen counter as a silverware station: forks, spoons, a stack of napkins, ready for whoever is heading to the pool and wants to grab something on the way out. The kids know where it is. They help themselves. That is, I have come to understand, the entire point.
These things don’t get arranged into one careful vignette. They find their own spots around the kitchen. That’s how Summer arrives in this house, too — not all at once, but in several corners at the same time.
I know, I know. They’re shown in one vignette here.
The other thing that changes is the pool.
We’ve been using it for weeks by the time school lets out — Memorial Day weekend is usually our unofficial first welcome to Summer. But there is a distinct difference between a Saturday afternoon in May and a Tuesday morning in June, and any family who has lived through the last day of school knows exactly what I mean. On that Tuesday morning, nobody has to be anywhere by 7:30. Nobody has a lunch to pack. Nobody has to wake up before their body decides to do so.
I have always known this. Even when I’m still in the office, my momma heart relaxes sometime in that first week after school ends, just knowing that my kids are home. That when I get there, they’ll be there, too. That nobody is spending a Friday afternoon waiting to feel free.
Once school is out, the pool changes character entirely. It goes from a weekend treat to a Tuesday morning, a Wednesday afternoon, a we-were-outside-all-day kind of place. The neighborhood kids start appearing earlier and earlier. Someone builds a fort. Someone else decides to try something that probably won’t work but is absolutely worth attempting. These are the long, unstructured afternoons I’ve always made room for — not because I planned them, but because I didn’t fill that space with anything else.
I believe in boredom and the creativity that comes with it. The bike rides that happen when there’s nothing else on the calendar. The elaborate pool game that requires twenty minutes of negotiating rules before anyone gets in the water. The fort that involves three households, a tarp, and a great deal of confident decision-making, that goes up outside and hangs around for the rest of the Summer, slowly morphing as someone thinks of the next best thing to add on to it. It can’t stay forever, but it will for Summer. This is what kids do when Summer gives them room, and room in Summer is the whole point.
We often start the season with a trip — just our family, a few days somewhere different before anything else begins. It has become a way of stepping out of the school-year pace before Summer fills in around us. The weeks that follow feel more open the way early June should: a birthday gathering around the pool, a few slow evenings on the patio, the quiet understanding that July is not here yet, and we haven’t wasted a single day.
Whatever Summer looks like in your house — whether school just let out and you’re still adjusting to the noise level, or you’re in the middle of the first truly unscheduled week you’ve had in months — there is something to be said for marking it. For noticing when the house changes. For not scrolling past the Tuesday morning when nobody had anywhere to be.
The sign will come back out. The flowers will go beside it. The basket will go on the counter. And Summer, the way it always does, will make itself at home.
