It’s finally summer in Michigan. Not hot, but warm, and the last week has been sunny and lovely. The trees have leaves now and the lilacs and Lily of the Valley are blooming. My rose bushes are getting leafy and robust and the irises have buds. I think the hydrangea will survive, and that makes me very happy.

This is a nice time of year here in this small resort town. By the end of the month, traffic in town will be backed up and the tourists and summer residents will be swarming all over town. For now, however, and probably for the next couple of weeks, it’s just a little busier and the weather is delightful.

I haven’t been out on my bike yet, and that’s unusual, but I’ve been busy and it took longer this year for the temps to rise to the level that I find acceptable for riding these days (60+). On most of the best days in the past couple of weeks when I could have gotten out for a ride, I chose instead to rake or mow the lawns. Winter was harsh and there was a lot of Spring clean-up to be done at both houses.

I have been going for long walks on some afternoons, though, and getting reacquainted with the neighborhood I grew up in, as I do every year after the snow covers everything up and I mostly stay indoors for 6 months. I greet the lakes and my favorite trees and check on the woodpecker who lives nearby.

I’m a summer girl. I have a friend who used to call these wonderful sunny, warm days “Wendi-weather,” and nothing could be more true. This is most definitely “it” for me. I like the other seasons, and I like having seasons. I couldn’t live anywhere that was always the same. I relish the outer-ness of summer and the inner-ness of winter. Summer is my favorite, though, hands down, and I’m thrilled to witness its rebirth again this year.

We’re pretty far north, and summer goes by very quickly. I try very hard to be present to as much of it as I can, especially the beauties blooming in my flowerbeds, the butterflies and birds, and the bunnies who have lived here longer than I have, under the big cedar tree in the back yard. I watch for the deer who comes to visit most days when I’m sitting out in the yard under the big blue umbrella. Last year she brought her fawn to meet me and they came together all summer after that.

I’m close to the airport and several times a week I get to watch the skydivers drift down under their colorful parachutes against the bright blue sky. This week I’m watching the kids at the school across the street while I’m at my desk journaling, as they play games outside and run on the track for gym during these last days of school. Their excitement at the prospect of the unencumbered days ahead is palpable.

It’s all becoming visible again – life – and I’m here for all of it. It’s much easier to be present to all of it now that I’m retired, and I’m ever grateful for that. Yes, the town will fill up and I’ll curse the tourists and the traffic more than once in the next 100 days, but it’s all life. Every bit of it. The joy, the frustration, the ups and downs. The blooming and the dying. The inner-ness and the outer-ness. Wishing for something different or “better,” or wasting time being unhappy because the world is not what I want it to be, is simply not the best way to go through life.

Does that mean that I don’t do it? Heavens, no. Just this last week I had a complete and total meltdown for 30 minutes over a kerfuffle with the city over the water meter at mom’s house. I ranted about how unfair it was that I had to deal with that old house, when IT ISN’T EVEN MY HOUSE, and about how inefficient the city is and how expensive it is to live in this town and the exorbitant amount she pays in taxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH! My 94 year-old mother just nodded and nodded and when I was finally all done, said quietly, “It’ll work out.”

And…of course, she was right. I called the city and we had it straightened out in just a few minutes.

I always seem to have a list of all the things that are “wrong,” or could go wrong in my life, and I spend more time than I should going over that list in great detail, usually in my journal, and sometimes just over and over and over again in the middle of the night after a challenging day. I know immediately that I’m spiraling into the muck when I start using or thinking the word “unfair.”

Nothing is really wrong, (or unfair) of course. It just is what it is. Life. I have a beautiful and fortunate life, with some challenges, like everyone else. I know just how lucky I am.

Unfair and what if are signposts on the road to resentment and unhappiness. Completely useless, too, as I don’t want to go down that road. Really, I don’t. Been there and done that for much of my early life. I want to be on the Loving What Is road, or the Be Here Now street. How about the It’s All Good trail?

I try, and I’m better than I used to be, but I’m not quite there. It’s not an automatic response to everything in my life, and probably never will be. That’s okay. Trying matters. and the only one suffering is me, really. Maybe my mom, who has to listen to the ranting occasionally, but now that she seems to have entered her Yoda years she doesn’t seem to mind.

I don’t think she even listens, and that’s just fine, too. No reason she should. She’s had her share of crap in her life. She doesn’t need to deal with mine, even if occasionally she or her house are the cause of it. That’s not intentional, and all of it is just as out of her control as it is mine.

I had a dream this week about bees–a huge swarm going overhead–and the person with me in the dream said, “Hmmm, a river of bees.” It stuck with me. and I hardly ever remember dreams, so I consulted the internet. Turns out there’s a poem with that title. A relatively famous poem by a relatively famous poet, W. S. Merwin. It’s a long poem, really vivid. Guess what it’s about?

The last lines are:

He was old he is not real nothing is real

Nor the noise of death drawing water

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive

But we were not born to survive

Only to live

I take that to mean: Don’t worry. It’s all good. No one survives this life. Sooner or later none of us will be real. Live while you’re alive, because it’ll all be over soon enough. Time passes and so do we,

Wise man, Merwin. Whitman, too. Happiness now, not later. It’s all good. Enjoy it while you can. Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Remember that song? Kinda sappy, but good advice, just the same.

All of it easier said (or sung) than done, but worth trying for, don’t you think? Especially in summer!