I know it’s really still spring but it is May. Plus, I live in South Florida and anything after March is pretty much summer. And I love summer nights.
I love being able to sit outside as the sun goes down and enjoy a nice family dinner together or watch the kids play in the yard. The yard that we moved for and that was inusable aside from dirt biking from January to mid-April. The yard with a gaping hole that is supposed to be a pool and freshly laid grass.
When we moved in 11 months ago, the backyard of our new home was our happy place. One of the first things we moved from our old house was their outdoor play tents where they played the days away while I moved in boxes and unpacked.
Once we were officially moved in, they would beg to come out immediately after breakfast, eager to run around. We did our schoolwork in the morning sun and ran through the sprinklers in the hot afternoons. But by the time “winter” (aka mildly hot) settled in, they were over it and I was begging them to just go outside.
The backyard is a sacred place for me. I grew up in the land of plenty. Well, we had a really big yard, anyways. Over an acre of land that was all ours. And being children of working parents, nights and weekends were the only time my sister and I had to enjoy our plat of land. And we did. We’d play the summer nights away when we didn’t have homework or to wake up early for school. We’d dance the nights away, frolicking around until the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out.
I loved those times and remember them fondly. The sound of laughter from the other neighborhood kids, the feeling of the cool grass and night-time chill moving in. Summer in Colorado.
And that is why we moved. To give our children the same opportunity to run around and be outdoors in a safe place, not where cars are speeding by or the risk of rolling into a mucky lake is very real.
The lull in outdoor excitement devastated me. During the time my children should have been outdoors, when it was cooler and less buggy, they just wanted to be inside and nothing I did could push them back to the great backyard. But the new grass, after months of outdoor restrictions, has renewed their backyard excitement.
They are back to spending their mornings out back (though they prefer to just not do school at all right now, a different battle I’m fighting) and we usually head out after dinner, too, enjoying our summer nights. The kids and hubby flip around the yard, practicing their gymnastics feats and racing each other the distance of the yard. We laugh and play until the sun goes down and it’s time for them to collapse into bed exhausted.
There’s something about the fresh evening air that both exhilarates and calms as the heat of the hot, Florida sun is pushed away by the soft breeze accompanied by the beautiful colors of the sun setting over our little piece of paradise.
