Hi Reader,
Come sit with me on the porch a minute — I want to tell you about summer the way I first knew it.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the Missouri Ozarks, and back then summer wasn't a date on the calendar. It was defined by the temperature of the Jacks Fork River. When the water was finally warm enough to jump in, that's when summer had arrived.
Every year, my family camped two solid weeks at a spot called the Baptizing Hole. Walk upriver and you'd hit Blue Springs. Float down past what we kids called "the rapids" and you'd land at Bacher's. In between was a whole childhood — canoeing, tubing, walking barefoot across gravel bars to test the water with our toes.
And then there was the watermelon.
My brothers — one and two years older than me — used to fight over who got to float it across the river and wedge it into the cold spring pouring out of the bluff. I have never, in over forty years since, found anything that tastes quite like a watermelon pulled straight out of that spring. I've tried ice coolers. They don't come close.
Those two weeks were marshmallows and inner tubes, fishing poles and flashlights, crawdad hunting at night with soda and beer cans in hand because everyone knew the big ones only came out after dark.
My mom worked the day shift at the local factory and drove back to camp every single evening. The people around our fire changed from week to week, but there was always a mom there — and she answered when any kid called her, whether or not they were hers by blood.
I didn't let my mom near my hair with a brush for two weeks straight. I don't think I wore shoes the entire time. I fell asleep most nights to the sound of grown-up voices laughing around the fire while I tried to finish "just one more chapter" of Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley by flashlight.
That's what summer is, to me. Not a season on a calendar — a slower rhythm.
Meals eaten at the water's edge instead of the table. Days measured by river temperature instead of clocks. A whole village of "moms" who show up for each other's kids.
I think we've lost some of that rhythm, haven't we?
Somewhere between school schedules and screen time and the sense that summer has to be productive to count, we let the slow, barefoot, watermelon-in-the-spring version of the season slip away a little.
That's exactly the feeling I tried to bottle up in Home Sweet Summer — a whole magazine built around slowing down and actually living the season instead of just surviving it until fall.
And this week, I want to hand it to you in a way you can hold.
