Another Forever Summer

I Made the Decision To Stop Time (Again)

My girls on the mountain

There isn’t a more volatile time in an American’s life than the years between 28-32. As a country, we shouldn’t allow friends or family members to make any major life decisions at this time. Postpone the wedding. Reconsider the move. Don’t make that career change. You are barely a person right now.

I will explain.

When my parents were in their early twenties they were fighting in foreign wars and buying their first homes. By 30 people were established in their careers, settled with a partner, and supporting families. Those days are over thanks to late-stage capitalism. The old milestones were made of sidewalk chalk, gone as memory.

Presently, our twenties are an extended young-adulthood. A time for starting-salary positions, partying, travel, or hopping from job to job in the gig economy. Many have to live with their parents because the cost of living has exploded beyond comprehension for a single-income life.

Which means thirty is the new standard for adulthood, the white flag of surrender to fucking around. By thirty, most Americans feel it’s time to be where they “should” be or at least working diligently towards it. We judge ourselves and others if things aren’t headed towards commitment of some kind.

Which is exactly why those four years are such a shit show. We make decisions on a timeline that no longer exists encouraged by older generations that had an entirely different set of cards. Our best-laid plans turn out to be plot devices instead of second acts, poker chips we hope turn into keepsakes.

It was during this period I made a decision that changed the trajectory of my life forever. It was chaotic. It was wreckless. It was naive and brazen, but it gave me the gift of an endless summer I never experienced before or since.

I want it back.

Seasonal Nostalgia

It was summer 2012. My head was a tornado. I quit my office job to farm full time, egged on by a [temporary] exploding readership I’d built with my old blog.

In two years time I bought a farm, quit my job as a corporate designer, purchased a British draft horse, and started a falconry apprenticeship. At this same time I wasn’t even thirty and publishing a homesteading title a year. I felt unstoppable.

It was a lot. I was a mess.

I didn’t realize any of this at the time. I wasn’t on earth anymore, propelled by things I wasn’t ready to entertain, much less deal with. And I was nearly 30, the danger zone of unhinged decision making. Despite the broken tracks ahead, it granted me the most magical summer of my life. It felt endless, like in my childhood. I didn’t know you could ever have that again until I tripped over it.

I quit my 9-5 in spring. The first morning I woke up without an ergonomic desk chair waiting for me was intoxicating. My entire life before 2012 was compiled of summers off from school or college—but they were sabbaticals from the drudgery of convention, not vacations, certainly not after 16 when I started working summer jobs. But now I was waking up free from every tether I once knew, wiring cut in an emergency. The whole day was mine. The week was mine. The month and every month onward was entirely up to me.

I was too young and stupid to be correctly paralyzed. I had a couple grand in my checking account so I knew I had enough to cover the next two months. This combination of gambled freedom and a temporary safety net was all I needed to stop time.

Days felt 50 hours long in the best possible way. Mornings seemed to last days, tan lines being burned into flesh on Monday mornings. I worked outside on the farm until my body ached and holy sweat dripped off in buckets.

When I worked in an office I hated humidity, it caused pitstains and ruined my hair and makeup. But alone on the mountain I worshipped it. I didn’t have to perform for anyone. The sheep didn’t care what my hair looked like. I quickly realized everything I thought I hated about summer were things that made me feel bad about my body, not the season. It’s how healing starts.

I remember jumping into the Battenkill at noon, floating on my back under giant waving sycamore leaves and cedar waxwings. I’d never felt happier. Without anywhere to be but my own farm I got drunk on the risk of sovereignty.

And when that summer ended I never felt it again.

The novelty rusted into anxiety. I made my bed but couldn’t afford the linens. The small amount of money I saved was gone, eaten up exactly the way home ownership and a farm does. What was once a dream became a survivalist’s nightmare. I thought a big book deal or viral YouTube video would change my life, the way it was for dozens of my peers, but that didn’t happen.

After that first summer of bliss, the following were terrifying. I did my best to keep going by any means possible but the emotional toll was paid by addiction, a horrific eating disorder, depression, self loathing and loss of discipline.

All I knew at the time was I had to keep going if I wanted to become the woman I was pretending to be—to find that lost forever summer one more time—not as a stunted child playing farmer, but as a confident woman who knew exactly who she was and what she had.

This will be that summer.

I’m Going Back

Not to the foolishness, but to the feeling.

I will savor this summer like a last meal. I’m not that terrified, confused, girl anymore. I am going to be 43 in July. I know exactly who I am, what I am capable of, and spent the last twenty years writing it down. I have the receipts of wonder and shame memorized; and with all that rattling in my ribs I’m choosing to return to summer like time slowed down one more time.

I am meeting sunrise standing in gentle rivers, watching native trout erupt like geysers at the first hatch. I am going to pack a daypack again, and walk along the white-blazed trails on the AT. I am getting on the back of my horse and feeling the connection and joy of a gallop uphill on a mountain trail. I am going to live like someone who has arrived at the place she’s been clawing uphill towards since she read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in one Christmas Day. The girl that believed magic was real if you were willing to come out of the closet.

I am not expecting romance. I am not expecting success. I am not expecting anything but the blessed rest away from wood stoves and sinking floors. I am not wasting a second after Beltane worrying about the million things that could take what I currently have, and I am going to write like a poet in love with the decisions I made at 28.

I’ve been homesick for that first summer for 13 years. I thought it was lost. I thought the choices I made before I turned thirty were a storm of impulse and delusion. Perhaps they were. But they gave me a taste of freedom and happiness people like me rarely feel in a world that thinks we’re broken. I refuse to relent to sadness or anxiety or the slow entropy of a body that still works as daylight grows like tired prayers.

Maybe the choices I made were all wrong. I guess we’ll find out together. But right now I am choosing to be one of the few people looking forward to what could happen instead of fearing what might. I am going to turn the bed I made into the time machine I need to feel alive again.

May the choices you made in your youth be good.
May your burdens ease.
May June last forever.

We all just need a little more time.