Endless Summer

Photo: Phil Mansfield for The New York Times. Click here for related article.

When I was a young child growing up in New York City, summer was synonymous with scorching days ending with hot balmy nights, rainbow icees eaten in a plastic bowl with a spoon, and running around in a swimsuit at public sprinklers. Our family was young, and money was being squirreled away for a home and for three college tuitions. There was no money to go away. Not that we did nothing all summer.

I remember going to Coney Island occasionally...


and to the Bronx Zoo...


and, maybe the highlight of several summers, the Queens fair...


...always with a picnic lunch of ham and orange cheese on Wonder white and a soda, both wrapped in aluminum foil.

When my sisters and I were a bit older and there was more money, my mother would take us sightseeing in nearby states. We would travel farther and farther as we got older, across the country, across the Atlantic...

But there was never a summer house, a place where one would return, summer after summer, to bike on dirt roads, to swim, to read quietly at a bay window. Though, I didn't know about that then as a young child. I would learn about the summer house later. I would learn that the summer house, the dirt roads, the swimming, even the bay window, belonged to families different from mine. I didn't regret my childhood summers, but I relished the thought of having a summer house one day.

The one day came sooner than I could have imagined. Without knowing it, I've lived in a summer house for several months now. Mornings spent at the beach. Lunch on the terrace. Afternoons reading quietly. The day seems long, but the days pass quickly in a blur of white sunlight. Summer must feel like that in a summer house, slow until the sudden end, when autumn and school sweep us along. I've lived here 9 months already, 9 months of endless summer.