I announced it nearly every day at half-past two. “Quiet Time!” I’d trumpet. “Time for siesta!” And lest you assume it was to benefit the boys, let me set you straight: Quiet Time was purely to keep my own summertime sanity intact.
I didn’t care. I grabbed my book and plunked into a patio chair out of earshot with a glass of iced tea, the air stultifying, mere hint of breeze rippling the river birch leaves. Sometimes Noah joined me with his own book, although it bugged him when I rested my bare feet on his chair. Sometimes he spent the hour in his room with Finny, his fish.
Out on the patio I read Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun. I pretended I lived not in Nebraska, with 104-degree heat that baked everything in my backyard to the consistency of a Pringle, but in Tuscany, amid rolling vineyards and olive groves. In Tuscany, where it’s perfectly acceptable to sip wine at noon on a weekday.
Throughout the summer, In an hour a day I read through Circle of Quiet (Madeleine L’Engle), Escaping into the Open (a writing book, one of the best I’ve read yet, by Elizabeth Berg), Still (by Lauren Winner – I’m enrolled in a writers’ workshop with her this fall and am scared witless!), and, most recently, Wild (a memoir so good it made me almost quit writing altogether, by Cheryl Strayed).
I tell you, that hour every afternoon on the patio? It saved me. It may have saved the boys, too.
What saved you from certain insanity this summer?
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So next Friday is the last installment of Graceful Summer. We’re actually back in school here in Nebraska, but since August still feels like summer to me, I decided to continue the series until the end of the month. So come back one more time next Friday!
