Summer by Definition

"How was your summer?"
"Lazy."

It's the best answer to the question most frequently asked in the first week of school.  Busy, exciting, exhausting, accomplished...none of these work quite as well as lazy.

We had company almost every weekend, doing what I had hoped we would do when we decided to decamp to Michigan for summer: relax, cook, laugh and enjoy the friends who feel like family and the family who feel like everything.

We picked blueberries, played at the beach, made s'mores, rode bicycles to the farm market and, in short, did everything we possibly could to cast ourselves in one of those glorious Pure Michigan television commercials.  There were none of the big moments that grow over time to make memories, just day after day of beautiful weather and lazy girls who rarely got out of bed before 11:00. 


Kate climbed a tree without screaming in terror the entire time, Mary plowed through four volumes of Harry Potter, I did not write a book, and Jack did not not take off a limb with his new hatchet. It seems we all accomplished just what we needed.

Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.  Henry James