The school district in which my husband and I work was released for summer break on June 7th. It is now the 24th of June, so we have had a few weeks to ease into summer break.
Some might think, “Oh, my. Poor teachers who must ‘ease into’ their nearly three-month vacation. I feel so sorry for them.” (Insert fake tears and sarcasm here.)
I get it. Other professions do not have the luxury of a summer vacation. Everyone else has to continue working while juggling their kids’ schedules who are home on their summer vacations. It doesn’t seem fair, and I’m sure it is not. But I do know that teachers need a break to heal from the school year. A friend of mine who recently retired told me that it took a year and a half for her to heal from being a teacher. She is finally able to truly relax and start enjoying her retirement. It shouldn’t be that way. Being a teacher should not be something that one must heal from, but it is true. Whenever I see a newly retired teacher, they suddenly look ten years younger than they did when they were still teaching.
During the school year, my alarm goes off at 4:30 AM every Monday through Friday. I then check my phone for messages and email, do yoga for 15 minutes or so, eat breakfast, skim the newspaper, shower, and drive to school to be there before 7:30. From 7:30 to 3:30 I am on. I have 105 students over the course of a day who need my attention. I have about 45 minutes of prep time in which to grade, plan, check and respond to emails, and put out any fires that may have come up that day. I have a duty period that either involves having lunch duty or meeting with other teachers. It is impossible to complete every task I am responsible for in a day, but at the end of the day, I put things in a tidy little pile and return to them the next day.
In the evenings, I am exhausted. I try to have enough energy to walk my dog, make dinner, do my household chores, and maybe sit on the couch for a half hour or so before bed. On the weekends, Saturday is shopping day and hopefully movie night at home with my husband, and Sunday is mostly spent meal prepping and getting ready for the week. Wash, rinse, repeat for the entire school year. By the time summer break is here, I am so ready.
But it takes a minute to ease into summer vacation. The first morning you have a big plan to sleep in. You ceremoniously turned off the alarm the night before. And that first morning, you do sleep in, until about 6:30 AM. It takes a few days to adjust to not waking to an alarm at an ungodly hour.
The first Monday of summer vacation is always exciting. I sleep in until I feel like getting up. I do an entire episode of Yoga with Adriene since I have time and don’t have to limit it to just 10 minutes. My dog always seems so happy on that first Monday morning. He doesn’t have to stay home alone all day, and he knows it. I put on the Today show and watch it while I eat my breakfast on the couch. My husband joins me, and we both read the paper and cuddle with the dog. Eventually, when the Today show is wrapping up, and I’ve read the entire paper (even the cartoons) and not just skimming, and I’ve slowly finished my large cup of coffee, I finally get up off the couch to take a shower. Slow mornings. They are such a luxury. This must be what it feels like to be retired. Someday.
June is interesting in Montana. You are ready to embrace the summer sunshine, but in Montana, the weather needs to ease into summer vacation too. Teachers want to get out into that sunshine, but often the weather has other plans. The beginning of this week was rainy, cold, and windy. Right around solstice time on June 21st, Mother Nature did her thing, and the end of the week was sunny and hot. Now, we’re talking.
Summer takes a little while to get into its groove, and so do teachers. At first your summer clothes feel and look funny, and your skin is finally exposed to sunlight. During this time of year, I get allergies. My eyes puff up and itch, and the allergy medication seems to cause me to gain weight. It will be a month or more before those symptoms subside.
You cannot wait to do all the summer things, so you try to do too many of them at first. On one of my first days off I walked my dog, rode my bike, watched a movie, read half of my book, cooked a nice dinner, and still had time to spare. It feels so indulgent to have that precious thing. Time.
Sometime during that second week off, you start to feel hints of that thing of which teachers on summer vacation shall not speak. Boredom. Now, if you have young children at home, you might never reach this stage. But for my husband and me, our daughter is grown and away at college and staying in her college town this summer. So, despite both of us having summer jobs as docents at our local historic house museum, we only work limited days, so we still have tons of time. We also can’t afford to spend too much since we are college parent poor, so no big summer trips are planned. We start to have movie night every night until we run out of movies. We have cocktail hour on too many evenings which could contribute to the mysterious summer weight gain. We are reading, riding our bikes, going to the lake (when it’s finally nice), and if we’re not careful, all that fun we’re having can start to feel like a job in itself.
Just when we start to feel like we might be getting into a summer rut, that third week of summer vacation rolls in and you find your summer purpose. A good friend of mine who is big on themes and is also a teacher would always come up with a theme for summer. One summer she got a stand-up paddle board, and she decided she was going to take that thing on as many lakes as possible during the summer. Around here there are a lot of options for a theme like that. She called that summer the “Summer of Lakes.”
My husband and I discovered our summer theme this past weekend. My mother-in-law passed away a little over a year ago. The family is now ready to sell her house, but first, everything must be sorted through. My in-laws were savers. If they got a new coffee pot, they put the old one downstairs in case they needed it as a backup or for parts. For years, they stored away all those things they might need or want one day in their garage and basement. I remember my mother-in-law saying in recent years that we all needed to come over and help her sort through everything, and we would have a big garage sale. Then she would chuckle and say, “No, I’ll probably just leave it for you kids to sort out.”
This weekend we started that process. On Saturday we spent the day cleaning out that garage that was completely full of stuff. On Sunday we tackled the basement. After hundreds of trips up the stairs, dozens of boxes, and truckloads of garbage, we’ve made a small dent. We also found treasures that my mother and father-in-law saved. There are antique items that have been in the family for generations, nostalgic items that my husband and brother-in-law remember from their childhood, and vintage items for many different decades. Yesterday my husband found some collectable crystal cocktail glasses that we used for happy hour last night. I found a box of pretty milk glass plates that my mother-in-law would use on special occasions. I love those, and I think they will be so pretty on an Easter dinner table and other events.
After all the stuff has been sorted through, we are going to have a big garage sale at our house. We live just down the street from my mother-in-law’s house. We hauled box after box of items to our garage so we could get it out of her house before showings that are happening this week.
There is so much history in that house and in the stuff. It takes time to go through it all piece by piece, and we have only just scratched the surface. My husband and I have found our summer purpose and theme. We didn’t realize just how much there is to be done involving this transition in our lives. Fortunately, we both have the time to commit to it. This summer will be the “Summer of Stuff.” It is special stuff, and I am grateful we have the time to really focus on it. I can just see my mother and father-in-law looking down on us from Heaven and getting a kick out of watching us uncover the fourth backup toaster in the basement. They would be happy too. Every time we find joy in some item they saved to pass down to their kids and grandkids. They did leave a lot of stuff to sort through. But they left us so much more than the stuff too.
