Feels

In the background, I could hear Rivers Cuomo singing about how "it feels like summer." For him, it would seem that summer feels a lot like unrequited love. Which sort of makes sense since most everything feels like unrequited love for our boy Rivers. And maybe it does a little to me, somewhere. But my story has a pretty happy ending, love-wise. I do remember summers in my youth when I spent hours and days and weeks preparing for what would eventually be a waste of time and energy since interacting with girls would require me to do some actual interaction. Which led to a certain amount of pining and complaining to others about how sad and lonely I was. Without a major label record contract to voice these issues.
Okay. So maybe summer once felt like unrequited love to me. But I pretty much put a lid on that series of chapters when I chose to move, the day after my thirtieth birthday, to California to set up housekeeping with the girl who would become my wife. My birthday is, according to many calendars, the first day of summer. So for a while summer felt like cross-country travel. This theme was repeated for a number of years as I returned to my ancestral home to visit and bring back souvenirs to my family who had no Trader Joe's.
Now they have their own Trader Joe's, and I still make trips back east to what we still refer to as the West, but I don't have to carry chili-lime cashews in my carry-on. So what does summer feel like now? It is currently marked by the unexplainable urge to build something. A fence. A railing for the front stairs. A tree house. These are the months that stretch out with the possibility of construction. Hammer, nails, cordless drill. A circular saw. The scent of freshly cut wood. It is this barely suppressed compulsion to cut and pound and assemble frightens my wife just a little. She knows that her job is to be on call for those trips to the hardware store for the missing piece or that extra piece of pine that didn't make the initial inventory. And she gets to ride the inevitable roller coaster of satisfaction with my own work. Sometimes she offers to help, but my own frothing doesn't always allow me to accept or understand this interaction. This yearning for construction continues until I can step back and admire my own handiwork, imperfect as it may be.
There are no current projects on the calendar. But it's early. And it feels like summer.