When summer begins

Jul 20, 2026

The long bridge stretches out before us for what looks like forever—a tiny stretch of another shore out there somewhere—and I drive the van because there is nowhere else to go but upward and shooting out over the water, even when I’m suddenly feeling faint like I am about to have a panic attack or pass out or both, my whole body shaking, legs jerking, hands—“just hold my hand,” I tell him, and he squeezes it for what seems like miles over Oregon Inlet—until we hit dry land again and I pull over immediately, get out, dig food out of the cooler, can’t find a fork but will eat with my hands if I have to. I shovel pasta salad into my mouth with a spoon, waiting for the shakes to subside. And finally, they do, and my whole body calms.

We are only about 45 minutes from our destination but nine hours into a drive that started this morning, and my body clearly needed something other than protein bars, potato chips and caffeine.

With only an hour or so of daylight left once we reach the campground, we head for the beach—because we are here; I finally made it. The water is too choppy to swim, but “Thank you, mother” and “I missed you” said out loud as I wade in her waters and hold my hands down to feel the breaking waves and crouch down to feel it over my whole body, mother ocean. I haven’t seen her in years—years since I floated on my back and rolled with the waves, letting her take me. Years since I watched that calming lull of water washing up onto sand, painting those big, foamy U designs on the shore, crisscrossing in lazy patterns.

Our usual after-dinner walk becomes a very different experience: to the sound of waves, leaving a trail of footprints. The beach narrows at one point during high tide, and the surf has formed a wall and there is no dry beach left, just dunes rising between us and ocean. He doesn’t want to get his feet wet, so we walk as close to the wall as we can. “This reminds me of one of the dreams where you’re between the surf and the ocean and then the tidal wave comes and there’s nowhere to go,” I say with a laugh, knowing he’ll know what I mean. He has no idea what I mean. He rarely dreams of water, he says, which surprises me. I don’t know which of us is the odd one, but water is a recurring motif in nearly all my dreams—swimming in it, being pounded by it, fearing it, looking for it, following it. I thought water was archetypal—for everyone.

I wake the next day in our tiny cottage swollen and stuffed up with a slight headache like a migraine is forming, the way dark clouds are forming on the other horizon opposite the beaches, and we know we only have so much time.

It has been storming off and on since we got here, whole roads flooded, trucks showing off in puddles, rip current warnings and high winds but then patches of sun and calmer waters, pockets of time when we head to the beach, and I can walk through the shallow, clear waters that bring tiny fish swimming up toward the shore and then back out to the ocean, in motion with each wave.

I eat fried food and cheeseburgers and fall asleep to the sound of thunderstorms and sleep perfectly in some blend of mold-illness gluten haze, but somehow it doesn’t matter here, or I don’t let it. Even the tap water that tastes like sulphur and the cabin mattress whose springs dig into me each night and leave me with a backache—nothing bothers me here. I just head back to the ocean.

This was the first time in months—since March, I think—when I’d had the luxury of choosing what to do, when it wasn’t part of a long line of “now do this,” “now do this,” “now do this,” and trying to keep up.

I could paint my nails. I could read. I could do nothing.

My life had become a series of deadlines packed so airtight, the completion of one only meant I could move on to the next. My whole life had become a deadline. Even the things I wanted to do felt like deadlines. If it was doable, even remotely possible, it would be penciled in.

When the calendar turned to July and I was still busying myself with projects and visits and trips and new endeavors, to the point of complete overwhelm, I started to wonder, worry even: when will my summer begin? I hadn’t even gone swimming yet.

I had a moment of clarity on the Fourth of July while up in Pittsburgh. I’d planned to be back in Frederick for the holiday, but I was so close to finishing the final final edit of a book, I couldn’t seem to break the momentum. I heard kids in a yard down below me in an above-ground pool, a woman floating in an inner tube, laughing, being loud. I put on noise-canceling headphones and continued to work, perfectly aware that I should maybe ease up the reins a little, that maybe movement had become compulsive. But I was so close to the finish line.

It reminded me of another Fourth of July, nearly 20 years ago, when I was on day one of a kidney cleanse where you eat nothing but watermelon for two days, and I was feeling quite faint while smelling neighbors’ cookouts wafting through my yard in Mountaindale. Have I always been like this?

Still in the midst of book edits, as if transfixed by the light of the laptop and only stopping when I needed food or sleep, I heard fireworks going off. I looked at the time—after 9 already—and headed for the roof to see if I could spot some displays. Instead it was a whole rooftop party up there, wine and margarita, chairs set out, “Oh, I wanted to introduce you to someone!” kind of thing. Deborah motioned someone to come over and meet me—a young woman, a new resident. When I tried to make a break for the door after some time, they both spotted my exit attempt and stopped me—“Are you leaving already?!” “It’s just that I am at the very end of the final final final edit of a book I’ve been working on for, like, 20 years,” I explained, but they had a lot of follow-up questions and wanted to order copies and we were suddenly planning a movie night to watch “Wild” together.

After I left the party—successfully—and retreated to my apartment, I realized summer is short, it is here, and if I don’t let it in, I’ll miss it. I probably should have drank some red wine when offered a glass. Take the holiday. Don’t be so clear-headed and logical and logistical all the time. After the edit, I would abandon all other projects, temporarily anyway—put everything down, wipe the calendar, take on nothing more, let my nervous system catch up. I had been talking to AIs too much and ping-ponging every 10 days from one city to another to hit doctor’s appointments and vehicle registrations and events and generally pushing myself too hard.

I still had one jam-packed week to get through before driving to the ocean campground I’d booked, but there was an end in sight now, a destination. First: complete 72 Hours on Monday and then drive from Pittsburgh to Frederick—but not without exiting spontaneously to a wilderness area that would not have a restroom or gas station but a creek and flowers I could pick for a car bouquet. I drove down a gravel road, muddy in parts from the storms that had just rolled through, and came upon a swimming hole with no one around. Without hesitation, as if God was saying, “We are giving you the opportunity to start your summer now,” I changed into swim bottoms in the front seat of my car and walked over to the water, got in wearing bra and tank top, and swam around, floated on my back, cool mountain water: this is summer. Summer is a verb. I arrived in Frederick wearing the clothes I’d just swam in, walked downtown blocks hoping passing cars and people would realize it was a bathing suit and not underwear but also not caring.

Next: complete two weeks of work in one so you can take time off, get to the overdue doctor’s appointments, host a party for freelance writers at the Blue Elephant on Friday—and pack the van with drinks bought on a Costco run, but also pack it for the beach. Pick up three 20-pound bags of ice and lug them across the gas station parking lot without them breaking and then across Fifth Street to load into the massive cooler you’re borrowing from The News-Post, order pizzas as people are starting to arrive, lean on your sister—“Can you pick up the pizzas and drop them off?”—and catch her showing up with her blinkers on and two kids in tow, one of whom wants to come to the party.

So they did, a stroller and a princess dress among writers and artists talking and connecting over Frederick’s art scene and the fate of the building we were standing in and the brilliance of the recent SilverVox Film + Music Festival and asides and nods and detours outside and laughing. This is summer—people coming together, iced drinks, sweat, spontaneity.

The party was supposed to run 5 to 9, but sometime around 8, I said, “Are you guys done? Like, maybe we should pack up. It’s a million degrees in here” (it was)—leaving just enough time for me to clean up, drop the cooler back at the office, decompress, and get enough sleep for an eight-hour drive the next day to the Outer Banks.

I didn’t mind when it rained all day at the beach and I was in a cabin with no bathroom and the weather alerts were showing dangerous rip currents. Summer had finally begun, and at the beginning, summer always feels endless—like it will go on forever. The ocean was just a bonus.

On the rainiest day of our stay, we swam in the campground pool and watched movies, and I made a run for my van mid-afternoon to look for my mold binder because I badly needed to detox from the humid, damp weather. There in the bottom van drawer were two canisters of cholestyramine powder, and behind them, I noticed the box containing my stepdad’s ashes. My mom had given them to me just before I got sick in the spring, which turned into pneumonia, which postponed my drive out to the desert. He wanted his ashes scattered there in Northern New Mexico. In the haze of illness followed by the nonstop motion of spring unfolding into summer, I’d forgotten I had them. But there I was in his other beloved place: Hatteras. A place he returned to year after year. Immediately I understood the trip was not just for me but for him. I asked my mom for her blessing, and she gave a resounding yes—scatter his ashes at the ocean.

The rains were gone the next day, so we headed back for the beach, me now carrying half of Z’s ashes in my basket among such ordinary things as bottled water and sunscreen. When the sun came out, I walked a good way past people, till there were only seabirds in the surf.

“Where do you want to be?” I mused to myself or maybe to him. “Everywhere,” I heard.

I brought a child’s plastic bucket to collect shells and also to carry the ashes in a small container. I cried a bit, thinking of all the times he was here in body and soul at Hatteras, and now he is only this. And, without much ceremony, I took the container, stood in the ocean, said my small goodbye, and poured the ashes out into the wind, into the waves. I don’t know if I expected something else to happen—nothing did, at least nothing out of the ordinary, but as I started to walk back toward the people, a huge bird swooped overhead and I was looking up at its underside, soaring and hovering in the sky above me.

This essay was originally published in 72 Hours / The Frederick News-Post.