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. Read More>