My daughter is in between needing daycare and being able to get a job during the summer, and we are sort of flummoxed about it. She has alternated between staying with me as I work and attending a parks & rec summer camp that is unfulfilling but what we can afford. We can't afford a nanny. She doesn't need a babysitter.

She's at the age that I remember loving summer the most, when the little kid stuff -- like swingsets and trampolines and splash parks -- is still fun and nostalgic but she doesn't need me hovering around her to enjoy it. She's at the age of flashlight tag and being able to light fireworks and riding your bike to the pool and walking down to the creek to look for frogs alone.

This summer we've patched together help from my parents (bless them), the parks & rec camp, a week of horse camp and a parent or two working from home, but I need a real solution for next summer, the summer of twelve, and the summers afterward until she can get a job. I don't even know how old you have to be to get a job here. I think I had to be sixteen in Iowa, though there was that one sketchy restaurant in town that hired fourteen-year-olds.

What do you do with a summertime middle-schooler? Is camp really the only answer? She's not interested in the parks & rec, she doesn't play sports, and the really cool camps are either too far away to commute to and still get to work on time or cost way more than we can afford to pay.

I'm frustrated. Finding childcare has been really the only part of parenting that I loathe. My daughter is wonderful. I don't want her to dread summer because she hates where she has to spend her days while my husband and I work, but staying home all summer isn't really an option. Why is this so hard?

I can't resist going outside on summer nights.

No matter how old I grow, on summer nights, I am seventeen again, pressing my face to the thick air, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the cacophony of insects that create a din where in winter there is only silence and cold. The cold sometimes creates a sound that is not a sound, but more a feeling.

The trees rustle where the boughs meet fifty feet above my head. I wonder who planted these trees or if they planted themselves. I wonder if the trees will still be here after I am gone from this place, and I am certain they will be. The trees don't care about my business. They'll offer shelter and shade to anyone and no one.

Summer nights convince me that I could walk away into them, walk for miles into their thickness and here on the edge of town I could disappear into the thickets where the deer live and the coyotes howl, pressing against the edge of the house rows. They ignore our presence and continue to be wild at the edge of it.

Once in high school I took a walk late on a summer night along the edge of a highway and out in the fields farmed by my relatives, I saw a million fireflies light up all at the same time. That they did that every night, that they still do that every night while I am sleeping or watching Netflix continues to center me and remind me that my little melodramas bloom and fade away like fireworks against their continuing thick summer night sky.

On summer nights, my favorite authors sat and thought and looked at similar fireflies and wrote their words, and sometimes I write some words, too, watching them explode against the screen before they fade away into the raging river of social media.

And I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour, and also comforted by it, because I am only just beginning to discover what so many more humans have known before me.

At my aunt's funeral last weekend, I remembered a documentary I saw about elephant mourning. Elephants are very intelligent, and when one of them falls, the herd gathers around it and touches it, sometimes moving to bury it under tree branches. They have even been known to do this for people. As I sat in the pew with tears streaming down my cheeks, I mourned my aunt who has been gone as I know her for years, taken by Pick's disease, but if I had a trunk, I would have raised it in respect for the woman I knew.

When I am gone, I would like an elephant funeral on a thick summer night. 

Outside, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the night creatures going about their business, I realize again how silly my ego really is. I can strive to scratch against the surface that is history, but ultimately a wayward star can erase not only me but every human who came before me and would come after. It's a scary thought, but also an oddly comforting one. I am all of it; I am none of it. The only thing that matters, ultimately, is how I treat people while I am here.

When we're gone, people don't remember so much what we said or what we did, but how we made them feel. We store that feeling with smells and tastes down in the animal portion of our brains, so much that when I cracked open an old book of nursery rhymes my grandmother used to read me, I heard her voice and initially thought I was being visited by a ghost before I realized this was my brain at work, my memory associating her gentle tenor with the words on the page.

On all summer nights, if I am alone and the air is right, I am seventeen and there are millions of fireflies hovering above the cornfields. I am seventeen and I will be someone and I will conquer the world and people will remember my name.

There was a day last week when I thought I might crack in two. Something happened with the girl, something happened with me, and I was so stressed out I found myself in my garage with tears coursing down my face, knowing my husband and my daughter and my neighbors were waiting for me in their SUV, ready to take us out on their boat in a beautiful invitation to frolic on Blue Springs Lake.

I'm trying to pretend I am mentally healthy.

I'm trying to model a mother who knows how to deal.

Earlier that day, my girl dissolved into tears on the way to summer camp, and here I was, dissolving in tears in the garage. I wanted very badly to model self-control.

I forced myself into the neighbors' SUV wearing my sunglasses. Tears still streamed down my face, uncontrollable, but I just assumed no one would see because of my sunglasses. In my experience, most people don't actually pay attention unless you draw their attention to you.

At one point, my neighbor woman asked me a question, and I just nodded, too upset to speak.

I wanted to model someone under control, though, so I just sat there.

It was awkward, I admit.

My neighbors are wonderful human beings. They invited us out on the lake on a Tuesday night, and they had every intention of taking us, despite my obvious awkwardness. We got to the lake and backed the speedboat into the water, and upon seeing the expanse of blue I started to feel the tension ebb, just a bit.

"Rita, all you need is some HYDROTHERAPY," my neighbor man said. And he dropped in the boat.

For three hours, we played. We tubed, the little angel and I knocking against each other in two separate tubes, her face alight with glee. I waterskiied. The little angel and my husband got up on skis gripping the boom, their eyes wide, finally understanding what it feels like to flit like a waterbug across the surface of the water at high speeds. 

It feels like flying.

We swam, and we saw the two parent eagles and the two baby eagles calling SCREE SCREE SCREE across the sky to their nest. 

"Do we have time?" my daughter asked, looking to the water. 

"Yes, it's 8:15. Sunset's at 8:41," said my neighbor lady.

And as we pulled the boat back out of the water, I felt like a new person. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you for letting me shake off my mood. I almost didn't come because I didn't want to subject you to me tonight. Thank you, it worked, the hydrotherapy."

My neighbors grinned. They are happy, wonderful people. They are my parents' age. I want to be them when I grow up, logging their time on the water in a little notebook, telling stories of when they learned to barefoot ski.

I saw the sun set that night over the water. It was summertime, and none of the things I thought were so important mattered.

Last year and this year, we've let my daughter stay home one day a week from summer camp provided she doesn't interfere with my work (well, more than making her lunch and things that can't be avoided). It saves us around $130 a month and it lets her get bored. Remember getting bored? And having to do something about it yourself? I think it's very important for her to learn to putter around the house so she doesn't follow her roommates around like a sad puppy in college.

On most summer Mondays, she watches way too much television, doesn't get dressed until five pm and folds her own laundry. I don't worry too much about her spending a day watching television, because it's one day and then she goes to camp the rest of the week and swims and bowls and makes stuff out of beads and does science experiments. Plus, watching TV all morning on a lazy summer day is fun. I'm jealous. 

And every once in a while, I walk into the living room to check on her and find an intricately constructed story hour so cute I can't even believe it.

She has way too many stuffed animals, too. But I don't care any more. Life's short.

It's been unnaturally cool here right up until this week -- so much so that last weekend the two afternoons we spent at the pool involved a little shivering, and none of us had the gumption to try the lake. I remember visiting San Diego a few times and thinking how nice the weather always is there, day after day after day. And then Kansas City randomly had day after day after day of seventy degrees. Surely, we thought, they would stop after Memorial Day. Nope. Still seventy degrees, beautiful.

Surely, we thought, not into June? 

SEVENTY SEVENTY SEVENTY SEVENTY

I realized I am too hot-blooded for seventy degrees in summer. I adore you, seventy degrees, in any other season of the year, but I like summer weather to be eight-five or above on the weekends so I can get in the water without shivering, lie on my towel and feel the water evaporating off me in the sunshine, walk inside a movie theater and catch my breath at the temperature drop. These things mean summer to me.

I was really starting to worry until this week. My husband is out of town for work and my mom came down for a visit. She took my daughter after dinner on Tuesday and gave me a pass to go write. I took my printed-out draft and my notebook down to a local pub and sat out on the deck for two hours, and the people I saw were wearing clothes I expect to see in June: tank tops, shorts, sundresses. The air still held the days' heat even after the sun set. When I walked into my house, I felt the air conditioning hit my arms. 

Thank God it's back to normal.

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. 

I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! 

Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. 

We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. 

The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. 

Summer starts early in Kansas City. My daughter's school gets out this week. The pool opens this weekend. The severe weather is already here. 

I just signed my daughter up for the summer reading program at the local library. Summer reading programs were my savior when I was a kid -- I remember the excitement of being rewarded for doing something I liked to do, anyway. I thought, this must be what it is like for athletes! 

Even though I no longer have an official summer break, the approach of that stretch of long evenings and heat-shimmering days still makes me happy. The first hot day has me staring longingly at the pool floaties. Smelling them, just because they smell like summer, like splashing and sunscreen and stacks of books and time to read them. 

We cut every activity except swimming lessons in summer and try not to make any plans that don't involve the lake or the pool or a backyard. Despite those measures, summer always shoots by way too fast, and here my girl just turned nine and we've had half her childhood summers already. 

The windows are open now, and I can smell the cut grass and hear the birds calling to each other, saying hurry, hurry, summer's almost here. 

Kansas City is in a stage D4 exceptional drought. I've never seen anything like it. The ground has cracked, just like in my daughter's picture book about Africa. The grass has gone dormant, the color of straw, prickly. This grass hurts bare feet. For the first time in my life, I've been watering the birds by leaving out trays of liquid. Some of the trees have gone fuck it and dropped dead leaves on the hay-grass, lending August the appearance of October even as the heat still shimmers on the pavement.

It's been a summer of dry heat, unusual for Missouri. Summers here usually feel like walking around with a wet washcloth stuck to your body. This heat sucks the moisture from my nasal passages instead of clogging them with thick air. When I emerge from the swimming pool or lake, the water evaporates within minutes, the wind thirsty for what clings to my skin.

I have spent the summer vascillating between internal panic about end-of-days weather and reminding myself draughts have happened before. In 1936. The copyright on my yellowed paperback of The Grapes of Wrath is 1939.

I asked my father if the dust would come. He said no, farm practices have changed, but this is the kind of weather that would do it.

Yesterday while I was working I heard a loud motor outside. I couldn't figure out what it was, so I went to look. The neighbor who has been watering his lawn had a lawn service come. And I realized that no one on my street has mowed their lawns since June, because the grass will not grow. It's sleeping.

This week, for the first time in months, the temperatures have dropped enough to open the windows in the mornings. Petunia hovers on her chair, her whiskers pressed against the screen. But it does not rain. 

I'm waiting for it to rain. 

The two-week Kansas City triple-digit heatwave is preparing to break! Phew! I was pretty sure I was going to have to go to a desert soon to cool off.

WE ARE GOING TO FREEZE!

Despite the ridiculous heat, we've been spending almost all our nonworking hours outside. We eat outside, we play outside, we sit on the deck and read or play on the Internet outside. From time to time, I become aware of the heat wrapping around my body like a hot washcloth and the sweat seeping into my clothes. It's not the active sweat of a hard workout -- I always notice the minute I begin to sweat when I'm working out -- but the passive sweat of a body attempting to cool itself off as inobtrusively as possible. Lately it's been not until I get inside and my skin cries out for joy that I realize just how incredibly hot it is right now.

When I'm very cold, I'm a jumpy, grouchy mess, but when I'm very hot, I find myself floating along, almost disassociated from my discomfort. My body is definitely more calibrated for heat than cold. My mind and my soul don't want to spend one more minute inside than I have to before the cold returns to Kansas City and I explore every inch of the space inside my house in an effort to find something new to do that doesn't cost money until the weather breaks and I can go outside without shivering again. 

It may be hot, but the weather's going to have to throw even worse than 105 to keep me inside for very long. I'd rather just float.

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