(Courtesy of Francis Schnepff)

As we get older, the meaning of summer evolves into something new.

So many times this summer I’ve wanted to have sticky fingers from a soft plum that I ate on the porch. I’ve wanted to wipe them dry and sit down to read or write, to feel in a way I can only feel in the summer. I would set some sort of mood, with a yellow light and creaking floorboards, the feathers my mom told me never to pluck grazing my prickly legs against the cotton, bordering on both pain and the pleasure of nostalgia. 

So many times I’ve wished for a night exactly like this, and yet every time I set the perfect mood, that summer feeling never comes in the way that I envision. For some reason, summer is the season defined by its difference, by the unique break it gives a child in the midst of their long year of learning. Now, when I come home in May, I am still taking a break from school, but the softness, the stickiness of summer is far from what I remember it being. 

So far, my summers home from Fordham are where I have discovered the true pressure of these three months. As soon as the water in Lake Michigan is warm enough to dive into, and the cement beach that wraps around Chicago is full of young people, my so-called summer begins. These summers have been full of work, hot kitchen air, the mundane work that constitutes intern-hood, commutes on buses and trains, bike crashes and sticky hands — but not from plums, from assembling hot dogs all day. These summers have left stains on my cheeks from crying after working a double, and having tables yell at me like I’m a child. They have been full of sunburns in all the wrong places and an ever growing pile of laundry that I never seem to have time to wash. And still, every year I stop myself in mid-July and tell summer to slow down. 

There is no other season that I have the same affinity towards, which makes me question the real reason why summer is so important to me, and to so many other 20 year olds across the world. Summer when you were young was the time to make a bucket list with your siblings at the kitchen table, and to make sure they were all checked off by Sept. 1. These lists set in place a criteria for fun, in a way, these childish activities are still the standards I have based the success of my summers off of well since I’ve stopped making them. Go to the lake, go downtown, play some sort of game, have a shopping spree, maybe even sell hot dogs. Today, summers have the same pressure that came with these lists, but it stems from a different source. I want to check off something that cannot be checked off: I want to feel the same magic that summer provided when I was eight. 

This year, I’ve realized that this longing for summer is not for the months that define it, but for a feeling that will never exist again in my life, and that, in many ways, makes me resent what summer means for my future. Summer will no longer be complete freedom from responsibilities, or months that grant the privilege of time and ease. Rather, summer will be a continuation of January, February, March, April and May, just 30 degrees warmer. And although this may sound like I am accepting the demise of magic in life, it doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy the beautiful times of these months. Summer’s best moments aren’t when we are thinking of it as some metaphor for youth; it’s when we are completely and utterly in the moment, laughing and crying, expressing and experimenting. 

These are the memories that create summer, and they are also the ones that exist separately from the pressure the title “Summer” manifests. I will still jump in the water with friends, or roam around outside on hot starry nights, or maybe even eat plums on the deck of my house. But it does mean that the months of June, July and August may not have the same expectations that they have held for me since I left for college. Now, these months are free from the definite identity that “Summer” carries in my head and I’m excited to enjoy them just as much, but no longer as “Summer,” just as three warmer months.

Frances Schnepff, FCRH ’25, is a communications major from Chicago, Ill.