My memories of summer start with heat. In the mornings, coming down to breakfast, hair sticky with sweat. Spending afternoons at the community pool, eating melted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hot fruit, wishing our parents would spring for something from the concession: salty popcorn, Sno cones, nachos dripping with gooey cheese. Evenings, still so light that we could sometimes walk down the block to the library in our pajamas, which felt like some incredible adventure. Then running through the grass, catching fireflies until it was time to go to sleep again, the open windows letting in some breeze, kicking at the single sheet, all that was manageable with the thick air.

I grew up outside Chicago, in a suburb called Oak Park, where many of my family and friends still live. As I got older, summer meant “L” rides to the beach,  the final blocks traversed with a pair of rollerblades, a skill I never quite mastered, so that on the downhill parts, I could almost always be trusted to run into a newsstand.

At the beach, my girlfriends and I lathered ourselves with suntan oil, virtually nothing protective about it, and laid out on bright towels to bake ourselves golden. We met boys, lied about our ages, and once drank spiked kool-aid from a large cooler with boisterous characters we’d only just met. Nothing bad ever happened, everyone was happy, the sun was high in the sky, and when we needed to, we just ran into the water, and fell down laughing.

Summer seemed to go slowly back then. Although eventually I got a job scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins when I was 15, I had very little responsibility, and spent as much time as I could with my friends. I got a little bit better at rollerblading. I got a little chubby from the ice cream.

Summer continued to mean different things to me once I went to college, and worked full-time instead of hitting the beach; moved to California, where the average July chill could bite through bone; relocated to New York, back to heat and the unwelcome realization that a weekend in the Hamptons required more makeup and preparation than a Saturday night in Manhattan. I didn’t know; hadn’t even brought a hairbrush our first time. Weren’t we lounging?

When I got pregnant with Scarlett, my family rekindled an old tradition of spending an August week at my uncle’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin. That’s where I told my grandparents that they were going to be great-grandparents, and it’s where we spent the next two summers as Scarlett got bigger, and I got weaker.

Though we lived in San Francisco by this time, my plan was always to spend a chunk of the summer in Chicago, preferably that frigid July portion, so that Scarlett would have the kinds of summers that I’d had growing up. ALS pretty quickly rescheduled our plans. There would be no plane rides with my daughter, my husband meeting us for a long weekend or two. There would be no more trips to the cottage; the steep walk down to the beach was a deal breaker.

Now summers are full of camps for Scarlett, and more time alone for me. It’s time I didn’t ask for. It’s time I don’t want. It’s July in San Francisco, but somehow it’s sunny in our backyard almost every day. I wheel out and sit with our new puppy in my lap. He is whiny about the sun, and prefers shade, even though I remind him that he came from Sacramento, and needs to suck it up. But he always wins, so I back towards the house until he burrows comfortably in my arms. I can see the ocean, and I can remember what it feels like to dip my toes in, to make footprint patterns in wet sand. I imagine being on the beach, with Scarlett, with Otto, with my nephew Jack, watching them all run through the waves, watching the kids fall down laughing.

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