Summer time-suckers

It is just past 10 and I have already done 2 loads of wash and hung them out to dry, biked 11 miles, eaten breakfast, reconfigured the pickup arrangements for our CSA through phone and emails, and sat and thought about what I shall do today. This is a frontloaded day. Summer is a good time for frontloading. Cool, sunny mornings should not be wasted abed.

I guess I am a morning person although you wouldn’t know it by my winter habits. Put it this way: I like to wake and sleep by the sun. I haven’t used an alarm for years. In the summer getting up at 6 or 6 30 seems natural.

I don’t accomplish more in the summer. It is just that summer encourages the kind of activities that take more time, whereas winter activities are concentrated. Biking and lake swimming require more time than a 30-minute intense workout on a machine at the Y. Entertaining spreads out onto the porch and patio and into the later, still-light hours.

Growing and gathering food or buying from the farmstands, washing and preparing it, preserving it, take up hours and hours, more than a quick trip to the supermarket. Add driving time when the farm where you and your friends are getting produce is 60 miles away and you are delivering for the community. Add still more time for leisurely conversation when the farmer is Amish. My mother used to call this “chinning”—the kind of joking, gossipy, friendly exchange that requires a very relaxed attitude toward time.

But the most important, time-consuming summer “activity” of all is no activity at all. Sitting on the porch swing, thinking about whether it is time to take the hose to the cottonwood fuzz that is collecting on the screens. Having a glass of wine with your sweetie, watching the birds and the trees.

Oh. I guess I have to get some head work done today, too. On to that.

And then I will spray down the porch (which I can ignore in the winter), clean the house of the summer dust and spiderwebs, do the leisurely yoga class, and go to bed early so I can find time for all those wonderful, time-sucking summer requirements again tomorrow.