Our children always grow more in the summer. I know it’s true because I am careful to chart it, marking them off on the closet doorframe sometime in June and again in the fall, near their birthdays. What is it about summer, I wonder, that spurs their growth?

My childhood summers were spent variously, at a grandfather’s rambling acreage in rural Canada, a lakeside cottage in Connecticut and on the narrow flat strip of sand called Fire Island in New York.

All of these were retreats from the hot, shadowy city my parents toiled in while we played in sunshine and water. Our summers were endless, it seemed. Now, of course, they are over in an instant, for me. But for my children, summers are still a vast, unplanned collection of days ripe for invention.

Walking to school on the last day of spring, my daughter noted that the first day of summer would fall on a school day this year. She thought it unfair but looked forward to the expanse of time it marked and the long, light days ahead of her.

Water and light are the elements of summer, for me. As the darkness of winter recedes, my eyes open along with my soul. The most significant memories always include water. 

One summer I spent long days in Grandfather’s pool, soaking my wounds from a grisly bike accident. Grandmother Collins, a retired nurse, insisted on scrubbing the imbedded dirt and gravel from my flesh and letting the sanitized pool water soak out whatever remained. My brother and I spent every clear day jumping in and out of the sparkling clean water, daring each other to stay under longer, dive deeper, swim faster. When the country doctor finally made his rounds to see me, weeks later, he looked in my round blue eyes and said, “Your grandma saved your skin, child.”

Years later, at our family cottage on Mt. Tom in Litchfield, Connecticut, I got my first sailboat. It was a little wooden Sailfish that I learned to maneuver by instinct, feeling the wind fill my sail, angling the boom just so, lowering the keel and hearing the ripple of lake water slap the hull when all went well. When it didn’t, and a gust of wind decided to test my skill, off I would go into the middle of the green water, humbled but undeterred. I circled that lake a thousand times. As years passed, the lake grew smaller in my eyes, except when I was in it. From the boat it was always vast. It may be where I first became comfortable being alone, for no matter how close I was to the family dock, when I was out in the boat I was responsible for myself. My actions determined my progress, my pleasure, my fate. It was a big lesson to learn from a little boat.

The ocean was my first love, and the one I am still true to. Not even half a century can shrink its size in my eyes. As a child I dreamed of living in the big gray house on the dunes, the house Herman Wouk lived and wrote in, and of drinking my morning tea to the tune of waves cresting and falling on the beach below. I knew I could never tire of the sight of that undulating sea.

My first memory of its power, and my own helplessness, came quietly as I was swimming out from the breakers one day and noticed that the harder I swam, the less progress I made. Too young and inexperienced to be afraid, I kept swimming, back towards the shore, stroke after stroke, breathing deeply, my heart pounding with the effort until I landed on the beach, my toes digging in gratefully to the sandy bottom . A lifeguard greeted me. “We were just comin’ out for you. Got yourself caught in a riptide, but you swam out of it. Good job,” he said admiringly. From then on, the ocean always inspired in me a mixture of awe and pleasure. It gave me a sense of my strength and my fragility, at once.

If the lessons of my childhood summers are any indication, those marks on the closet wall tell only a fraction of the story of a summer growth spurt.