summer lovin’

“It must be nice to have the whole summer off,” someone wrote me in an email. Oh honey, you don’t even know. A friend and co-worker and I went out last week and one of the best questions she asked was, “How does it feel not to have to wake up and go to that place everyday.” Oh honey, you don’t even know.

I love my job, the children, the creativity, the collaboration. Sometimes I feel so lucky and can’t believe that I get paid to help a kid read. It’s like, like gold. Then, summer comes and somehow we teachers have no idea how we struggled through the trials of the past year, because there are trials we go through that would make you cry and sometimes they do. So, summer is our gift, our other golden egg and sometimes we take it and run with it. It’s the third summer in my life since 16 that I’ve truly taken off and not tried in some way to supplement the money I didn’t make during the school year. I don’t need to worry as much anymore because sometimes the taking advantages of the gifts that are given are worth more than the sacrifice that money can bring.

I’m reading a lot. I mean A LOT. I read two books last week alone and if you know me then you know what a struggle that used to be for me. I’ve become obsessed with books lately. I won’t be the old woman with cats. I’ll be the old woman with books billowing from the windows, replacing the tables and the flooring with every word the English language can offer up. It’s OK; I’m totally OK with being a dork. I’m making up for the lost time as a child when I should have been reading rather than trying to climb the social strata.

I hear very smart and famous people say all that time that books where their saviors as children, that they read whatever they could get their hands on, that the library was the favorite place. Oh God. I hated reading. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and truly started reading for pleasure that books made a dent in my brain. And I was and English major. I know, shocking. But, I struggled with reading and now that I teach young ones to read I’m finding out why I may have struggled so. I think I had a bit, a smidgen, a glimpse of an undetected disability called dyslexia. This is all speculation, but my mother says that it wasn’t until my fourth grade teacher went back and re-taught me phonics that my reading caught up with me. From what I know now about reading, that makes sense.

Anyway, I’m making up for lost time. And I seem to be doing it all now. Well, since December at least. Have you even checked out
the books I’ve read lately? Good lord. And I won’t comment on how my friends tell me to get out of the house and stop reading. I can’t. I’m addicted.