The summer I refused to fill

Dean is eight and Rey is six. I almost signed them up for everything again this summer — camp, swim lessons, the class at the library, the other class I cannot even remember now — and then I didn’t.

They are still fully ours in July. They still wake up too early. They still need me to open the yogurt. Next summer will look a lot like this one, and I am trying not to waste that by filling every hour.

So we did something unfashionable. We planned almost nothing.

• No camp. Rey was mildly offended by this and then asked to paint at the kitchen table for three weeks.
• One trip, four days, to the same lake we always go to, with the same slightly damp cabin.
• A standing Wednesday at the pool at four, when it is quieter and I can actually hear them.
• A lot of nothing. Genuinely a lot of nothing.

I expected to feel guilty. Instead I keep catching these long, unremarkable stretches: Rey coloring at the kitchen table at two in the afternoon and telling me, unprompted, about a girl in her class. Dean reading on the porch floor because he prefers the floor. The four of us eating cereal for dinner in June because nobody felt like cooking and nobody had to be anywhere.

Boredom is the last thing I can still give them, and it turns out to be the thing they talk to me during.

The laundry is unbelievable. Chlorine and grass and the wet towels that never quite dry. I fold it by the open window in the afternoon and I am, embarrassingly, a little bit happy about it.

Ask me in September and I’ll probably tell you we wasted the summer. I’ll be wrong.