Savoring Summer After 50 (Even When Summer Is Not Your Favorite Season)

On paddle boards and pool days, short trips, the tomatoes, and the magnificent knowledge that fall is coming

I am going to be honest with you right from the start, which is the only way I know how to do things.

Summer is not my favorite season.

There. I said it. On a lifestyle blog. Just after Memorial Day.

I grew up in the Midwest, where summer meant cool mornings and temperate afternoons, the occasional really hot and steamy day, and more often than not a wind off Lake Michigan that cooled things off even when the temperature climbed. Nothing like the South. But I knew what humidity was.

Summer in North Carolina is something else entirely. It does not slowly creep up on you. Sometimes it just arrives overnight, unannounced. One day the mornings are cool, the afternoons sunny, the windows open for sleeping. And then the next morning the sidewalk feels like a bonfire by the time you finish your morning drinking chocolate. A slight exaggeration. But not by much. And this goes on for months, not weeks, with what seems like no end in sight. The only walking Patches and I do is early, just after the sun peeks out, and well after dinner when we walk with the mosquitoes and the bats.

And yet. As I get older I try to enjoy each season for what it offers rather than wish it away. There are four of them, after all, and one is my favorite. You have heard about that many times if you have been here for a spell. Fall. Glorious fall. Cozy season, plaid season, cinnamon and spice, pots of soup and lots of baking. Clearly I was born for fall. I was, after all, born in it.

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Summer is one of the others. But I can endure it and find the snippets I love. Over the last few years I have been trying to show up for it and enjoy the things about it I actually like. For older adults especially, I think this is one of the simple ways we find our way back to ourselves. Not by overhauling everything. Just by showing up for what is right in front of us.

Here is what showing up actually looks like.

The Early Morning Is Everything

In summer, the morning is where the season keeps its best self.

Before the heat settles in, before the humidity has fully committed to the day, there is a window, early, requiring some willingness to be awake before you would prefer, when summer is genuinely beautiful. The light is extraordinary. The birds are extraordinarily loud. The garden looks its best, bright and full, before the heat zaps its energy and leaves it gasping for a little shade and some cool air.

We paddle board, Bill and I, and paddle boarding on our lake here is a completely different experience from where we started, which was the Lynnhaven Bay Inlet in Virginia Beach. On the Lynnhaven you paddled with purpose. You fought the wind. You timed the tide. You pulled up onto little sandbars or found the oyster shell islands that appear only at low water and felt like you had discovered something, a bit like Lewis and Clark. We actually named one little island that would pop up every now and then Sacagawea Island. Yes, I know it was Pocahontas who was from Virginia, but we liked to think of ourselves as Lewis and Clark as we paddled through the reeds so tall we could not see over the top. It was exhilarating, and a challenge in a way that kept you very focused on not falling in.

Here on the lake, early in the morning, it is something else entirely. Still water. Quiet air, unless a storm is brewing and then the wind can get quite strong. The peace and quiet of moving through a morning that has not yet been touched by the day. It is one of the best things summer here actually offers, and I go as often as I can.

A short walk in the early morning before the heat arrives is one of the small things that can change the whole shape of a day. If you are a woman over fifty who finds the heat harder than she once did, the morning is your season within the season. Move your walks earlier. Have your coffee on the porch before the day turns. Find whatever version of early summer your place offers and enjoy it.

The Club and the Lost Art of Simply Being Somewhere

We go to the beach club or the pool two or three times a week during the summer, and every Sunday after mass. I have come to think of it as a little vacation. Part of the summer holiday.

Sometimes I am in the water. Sometimes I am on the side with a beach read, a little time away from my day, enjoying the laughter of the kids and the buzz of activity, or sometimes just the quiet of having the place nearly to myself. There is something about savoring summer not by doing more but by slowing down and doing less, by being fully present in the moment rather than planning the next thing. Friends appear. We catch up and then drift back to our chairs, or sit together in comfortable silence, reading, resting, eyes closed. These are some of the simple joys that summer in midlife actually offers, and I have learned not to take them for granted.

I grew up going to the neighborhood pool and my aunt’s pool. This is not that, and I mean that as the highest compliment to both. Then, the water was cold and the pool was filled with strangers, friends, cousins, noise, games, and the particular chaos of summer childhood. Wonderful. Gone. What the club offers now is something different. The easy companionship of people at the same stage of life. An afternoon with nowhere urgent to be and no small stuff pulling at your attention.

After fifty, the ability to slow down and simply be somewhere is not laziness. It is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. The pool is mine. Whatever yours is, a porch, a garden chair, a bench at a local park near water, find it and go there without your phone.

Short Trips and the Gift of Anticipation

This summer is going to be a busy one, and I mean that in the best possible way.

We have trips planned to New Orleans, Amelia Island, Oak Island, and the Midwest to visit family members. Friends and family are coming to visit us as well. Adult children, aging parents, old friends making their way through. Day trips around North Carolina are scattered in between. The calendar is full in a wonderful way that makes summer feel like something to look forward to rather than simply get through.

Everyone one of those trips gives me something to anticipate, and looking forward is genuinely a good thing in midlife. It keeps you oriented toward what’s coming rather than stuck in what is hard. And midlife can be hard. The caretaking, the health worries, the losses that start to accumulate quietly. Having something on the calendar that is just for you, even something small is not selfish. It is necessary.  Travel is the best self care at any age, and I mean travel loosely. You do not have to go far. You do not have to go for long. You just have to have something on the calendar that is not ordinary life. A new place, even a close one, is still a new place. New things have a wonderful way of reminding you that the world is larger than your current view of it.

Short trips are a perfect chance to see something new, travel with people you love, and come home with that particular satisfaction of having gone somewhere and come back. Plan something. Even something small. Especially something small.

Seasonal Foods and the Case for Eating Like It Is Summer

I grew up eating seasonally. I also grew up with three television stations, but that is a story for another day.

We ate with the seasons most of my life and honestly still do, for the most part. Fresh berries still warm from the sun. Blueberries, strawberries, peaches from the orchard down the road. Sweet onions. Tomatoes. Zucchini. These are meals in themselves. A caprese salad. Corn on the cob. Fresh berries with cold whipped cream. Simple, perfect, the kind of food that does not need much done to it because it is already doing everything.

For drinks I move toward cold and cool. Fresh squeezed limeade. Lemonade. Sweet tea when friends come. But one thing does not change regardless of the season, and I know people will think it’s strange. My morning drinking chocolate is non-negotiable. Not in January, not in August, not ever. It goes in my French toile cup and that is the morning, summer or otherwise. The limeade is afternoon. The chocolate is sacred.

Rituals are sacred and non-negotiable, especially in midlife.

The Long Days and What to Do With Them

The long days of summer are one of its genuine gifts, even if I will confess to you that I am the woman who quietly cheers when the days start getting shorter again. There is something about the early dark of fall and winter that feels like permission to come inside, light the candles and stay there. But I can appreciate the beauty of a long summer evening for what it is.

What those long days create is time. Time to sit on the porch after dinner and talk, or put on a little music, or just listen to the symphony that starts up at the end of every summer day. The crickets. The frogs. The particular sound of evening settling in and the day giving a sigh. An after dinner walk to the best spot in the village to catch the sunset, or simply sitting on the hill and watching the glow spread out and fade. A beach day that runs from lunch all the way to s’mores over a bonfire because nobody is ready for it to be over.

Summer has a looseness to it that other seasons do not. Even if you have a job, even if the calendar is full, summer feels a little more free, a little more impromptu. It makes you feel, if you let it, a little like a kid again. Staying up late reading a new book. Watching the stars. Sitting up talking with family and friends long past when you meant to go to bed. These magical moments are underrated in any season. In summer they are practically required.

The small stuff, the things that seem too ordinary to count, turn out to be what you remember. That is true at any age. It is especially true for older adults who have learned, sometimes the hard way, that the small stuff is actually the whole thing.

The Magnificent Knowledge That Fall Is Coming

Even knowing I will enjoy the pool, the cookouts, the late nights and the travel, I will still be savoring summer partly because I know what is ahead. The end of one season and the beginning of another. Fall.

Every hot humid day is one day closer to the winds of change. That first cool morning when you need a sweatshirt for your walk. The first glint of color on the trees. The change in the light that happens so quietly you almost miss it and then suddenly you cannot miss it at all.

I am not going to pretend that thought does not comfort me. It does. It is part of the deal.

But here is what I have figured out somewhere in my mid fifties. Every season has something that belongs only to it. And every season in life has someone in it who may not be here for the next. That is not a sad thought, or I do not mean it as one. It is just true, and the truth of it makes the present moment matter more.

The last days of summer have their own particular sweetness when you let yourself feel them. The end of summer is not a loss. It is a threshold. And I have learned, slowly, to stand at it with some gratitude rather than just relief.

Summer has the paddle board on a still lake at six in the morning. It has the tomatoes and the peaches and the berries still warm from the sun. It has New Orleans in August, which is either brave or foolish and probably both. It has the long evenings and the friends who appear at the pool and the limeade that tastes exactly like summer should.

I still love fall best. I am not going to apologize for that. But I have stopped spending summer waiting for October.

That is my true self showing up for the season I was given, not the one I would have chosen.

What does your summer look like this year? Are you someone who loves it, or are you finding your own wonderful way to show up for it? Tell me in comments. 

Have a wonderful day friends.

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