Routines and Races This Summer... BY MIA!

We’ve settled into a worn routine, which is what makes a house a home. Yes, even a house with one-inch walls that are sometimes frighteningly hollow and an eternally dusty concrete floor. It’s the routine that makes summer feel less like summer, even in the most summer of places, despite the routine strictly mandating daily surfing. Work on the house in the morning, lunch, school-y work in the afternoon (online classes until a week ago, now it’s college essays or reading one of the books I pick from the Classics shelf at the library), swimming at 3:30, directly followed by a beach trip that I often spend with my head in a book and my toes in the coral sand.

It’s a pretty summer-y schedule, I guess (we are in Hawai’i), but I’ve always thought of summer of the time when routines, obligations, and schedules hibernate, coming out of their orderly caves in late August, all refreshed and new. I’ve honestly never experienced this type of fantastic summer before, though, and the more I wish for it the surer I am that it doesn’t exist. Rolph summers are less like ‘summers’, and more like life. Except with the family. And we are in a tropical paradise…. And I don’t plan on spending my life remodeling houses. So scratch that—Rolph summers are Rolph summers. They are very different from other people’s summers, and they are all very different from each other, while still managing to keeps the same basic characteristics. We are always together, we always go somewhere crazy, do something crazy, and keep busy busy busy. Also, there’s usually a house involved, I’ve noticed.  Routines are central though and as a family we’ve gotten good at establishing them, even on the road.

Our summer routines get old quickly because they are so fast paced and we all tire ourselves out trying to slow them down because—well—its summer! It actually works surprisingly well, and I don’t know if anyone’s noticed. Instead of all routines and schedules and obligations disappearing for the months of June and July and August, we just switch them around! The school year one ducks her exhausted head and the Rolph summer one raises his—the school year is the tortoise, summer is the hare. Two and a half months later, the hare is collapsed under a palm tree and the tortoise sniffs the air. We are all so tired out from chasing the hare around that following the tortoise is a nice change, even though it’s a race that lasts nine and a half months and we have to carry a bag full of textbooks. Life’s a race, guys! Make it a relay to keep from killing yourself from bored exhaustion—the only thing to get bored of is routine. And I’ve hit the end of my rope, personally. Figuring out that you’re whole year is a big routine will do that, especially if that big routine is actually established by someone other than yourself. Good thing I get to hop off the train next year and learn to love its smooth tracks while I bushwhack through the jungle of college and ‘real life’….