Summer's End

I worked at registration today, and that officially marks the end of summer. From this point on, everything will be simply preparation for the coming school year. I hauled about a million pounds of books from various spots in our library to issue to the senior class, said "Have you finished your summer reading" so many times I'll probably dream about little imps capering around, waving summer reading sheets, and singing that tonight, and saw students I know and students I don't who will be mine in the year to come.

Summer gets away so quickly. Every year, I have grandiose plans, goals I will accomplish as a conscientious person who makes the most of her time. Every year, about this time, I find myself wondering why so few items on that list got done. This year, I did get a new shelving system installed in my junk room, but I certainly didn't give it that Clean Sweep style purge that it so desperately needed. I never finished painting the trim on my house, and I certainly never built that maneki neko stained glass window I was intending to create for my classroom. I didn't get my act together to go to Memphis for a tour of Sun Records and some Rendezvous BBQ.

I think I need to think about summer differently. I need to quit pretending that I am going to leap out of bed every morning at 5:30 p.m. when I don't have to do it, run outside with various "implements of destruction", manicure my yard, my dogs, and myself, and have a sumptuous repast laid on the table for all my family and friends by 6:30 p.m. I need to quit beating myself up if I don't completely renovate every room in the house. That's not what summer needs to be for me.

I need summer to be pretty much what mine was, a chance to catch up on reading, both required for my classes and all those books I buy and put aside because I don't have enough time for them during teaching and taking classes. I need summer to be about sleeping late and trying to repair the damage I do to myself during the school year by not getting enough rest and being too stressed out. I need summer to be a time where I can stay up all night working on my blogs, my class pages, Shelfari, and so on because during the school year, all of this goes by the wayside. It needs to be a time I can reconnect with my best friends, most of whom are also teachers and lead the same bizarre, exhausting life as I do, only with husbands and babies to boot.

As this summer ends, I constantly hear the question, "How was your summer?" My answer is going to be that it was great from this point forward because, even though my To Do list isn't a whole lot shorter than once it was, I did take care of the things that were truly important and now I'm more or less ready to face the year to come.