August has come and gone. Welcome to September, the season of local summer, sweaters, old fall playlists, and school calendars. Time moves on, people come and go, and summer passes us by.
I have a complex relationship with summer. My entire life, my summers have been the same, which perhaps was the only comfort that came with it.
Ocean City, New Jersey is a tourist destination. “America’s Greatest Family Resort”. I sometimes see people wearing branded merchandise from my hometown in different states. Growing up there is a completely separate blog post, which will probably be written over the course of my entire lifetime and only ever be released in my non-existent-but-often-thought-of memoir, but for now, I’ll just say that there is a culture that comes with the town. Growing up on the mean streets of the dry island paradise of the Jersey Shore shaped my existence in countless ways. The most relevant to this particular blog post being that it taught me how to work.
I was working when I was about eight. Selling newspapers on Sunday mornings with my sister, and eventually, my friends. The Philadelphia Inquirer, anyone? (No one cares about The Atlantic City Press.) When I turned fourteen, me and every other local kid on the island got our legal minor working papers from the guidance office of Ocean City High School before we had ever even taken a class there, and with them our first official summer jobs. We clocked in at the local pizza place, or the arcade, or the overpriced boutiques, or the breakfast diners, or the grocery stores, or the day sports camps to occupy rich people’s children while they clinked cocktail glasses at brunch. We catered to the tourists, the renters, the college kids, the summer people. We worked one job or two jobs or three jobs. We went to our summer sports practices at Carey Stadium and did our summer break homework at the last minute and made all the money we could. We’d stretch it through the school year, until the summer people returned, and with them, paychecks once more. And thus was the pattern of my existence, and the existence of most other people I’ve known my entire life.
Which brings me to my current point, a summer recap. A reflection. A résumé, maybe, for all my French readers. So, what did I do this summer? I worked! From 5 am-9 pm, most days.
This summer, like every single summer before it, was spent with my family. In the bakery. Potentially my favorite place on Earth. I decorated cakes and mixed icing and glaze and frosted cupcakes and piped out cookies and scooped muffins and made buttercream and helped customers and ran the oven and finished donuts and cut out bread and made coffee and prepped pastries and made custard and rolled out danish and cinnamon rolls and laughed and cried and talked and loved.
Dot’s Pastry Shop is full of my favorite people. My parents who I love more than anything, who somehow love me even more. My sister who is stuck with me for the rest of our existence and one of the best people I know. My favorite cousin who I get the incredible privilege of living right next to and the even more incredible privilege of knowing and loving. My extended family who visit on a rotating schedule to walk the beach and work a single morning which takes them back to when they were my age, doing the same thing in our family’s bakery 50 years ago. My grandparents who I sit and chat with on their porch every morning after delivering them a coffee and a cheese pocket. My coworkers who I’ve essentially grown up with over eight years of 6 am conversations with, who know me better than most. The former employees who feel like family and walk through the back door to introduce their wives or fiancées or kids to me and my parents. The regulars who have been coming in for as long as I can remember, who ask when I go back down to Miami, or how was my Europe trip, or if I have any warm glazed donuts in the back. My favorite high school girls who send me updates and videos when I’m back at school and make me wonder how they have so much figured out at their age that I didn’t. The women older than me who come back every summer, who I get to come to with all my problems and questions and feelings about navigating adulthood, who validate me, and listen to me, and show me what real women look like, and what my life will or won’t look like.
And when I have all that, I can hardly complain about a 4 am alarm six days a week (though I do, occasionally). I see the sunrise every single day, maintain access to endless free coffee and fresh pastries, I get to see my favorite people, I’m on aux, I can’t get fired, and I clock in and out of work before half the island even leaves their house. What else can a girl ask for?
So, after work? Either changing into the bikini I keep in my car 24/7, walking the two minutes it takes from the back door of the bakery to the beach, and making some sense of my existence by floating in the ocean before letting the sun dry the saltwater off my skin. Or, more likely, driving to Greate Bay Fitness in my work shirt still probably covered in blue icing and chocolate, getting a workout in while avoiding faces from high school, showering, changing into a real outfit, getting back in my car, driving back across the 9th street bridge, picking up probably my third coffee of the day, and clocking into my second job! Which surprise, I also love. Bowfish has also become a second home over the years. I started working on the floor of the hair studio there when I was fourteen. The owner, Caitlin Quirk, is one of the coolest people/mentors around. If there’s anyone I want to be like when I grow up, it’s her.
This summer, I’d clock into the studio (no longer doing hair, just administration), spend some hours working there, then clock out once more. And from there? Either home, off to hang with my friends, or clocking into my third job! Which I somehow love an equal amount. I mean, a secondhand clothing store all about sustainable fashion run by a badass feminist, which is reducing waste in landfills and donating proceeds to building composting systems in local schools, is potentially the most up-my-alley thing anyone could think of.
So, this summer was one of work. Basically, all the time. But 1) I made absolute bank. And 2) to reference my opening paragraphs, it’s exactly what I’m used to. A summer internship, a summer vacation, a summer solo backpacking trip, those were never really on the table. My family needs me home in the summer, so that’s where I was. And that’s just how it is. These summers with my family ground me in an unexplainable way. A return to center, as I would say in yoga.
But! I promise I have a life, too. My best friends were also home this summer, and seeing them makes my heart indescribably happy. As we all get older, especially now that we’re all beginning to graduate, its no longer a given that we have these times together. So any moment we do get, I cherish endlessly. And they’re already rare enough, considering we have like seven jobs between us, and overlapping free time can be hard to find. Friendships are one of the greatest gifts of my life, and I take them seriously. I’m well aware that as we get older, it’s going to take more than a short drive to see the people I love. The era of plane tickets, scheduling months in advance, and finding weekends off work is upon me already. But for now, I will squeeze the humans who have become my family and know that no matter how long we go without seeing each other, I am rooting for them every moment of every day, and no distance is greater than the bonds that hold us together.
What else? My sister graduated from college, and I’m proud of her. I went to see my ultimate celebrity crush (Sadie Sink) perform in a play on Broadway that was so good I ordered the script the next morning, and it’s getting its own blog post (whenever I have the fucking time). I went on hot girl walks with friends and drank fancy cocktails and tanned in my backyard and read books and swam in the ocean. I went fishing off the Corson’s Inlet bridge with my dad and caught up with my favorite local librarian and went thrifting in all my favorite Egg Harbor thrift stores. I got to finally go to the local bars with my friends (21!). I went to Pride in New York City with Sab and Sara and was overwhelmed, as I always am, by the overwhelming love in our community. Mia came to visit me in Ocean City, and I got to take her to some of my favorite places. Tammy turned thirty-five and flipped the knife perfectly into the cake I made for her. I experienced The Point (noun) for the first time and drank milkshakes and storm-watched with Liam. I watched Quinn play guitar and sang along to Margaritaville with all my other coworkers at a local brewery. I went out to dinner with my family, a too-rare occurrence in the summer. I read poetry and walked the beach and ate ice cream and people-watched on the boardwalk. I went to a rock concert with my dad, our summer tradition and one of my favorite things ever. I drank wine and ate pizza on the beach at sunset with Maddie. I went to see Hay Vay play in Philly with Emma. I gossiped with Kate and Shea and Gianna and Ally in the bakery before going into supervisor mode and telling them to go clean something. I ran into Aria and her entire family accidentally on the 32nd street beach that will forever be ours. I drove up to spend some time with Mia in her hometown, tried line dancing for the first time, and wandered the most adorable hometown streets, soaking up every second with her. I got brunch at John and Patty’s with Katie and Nicole and Tammy, the three other women who make the bakery work. And I got to know someone else, felt new things on the benches of Central Park and the art galleries of The Met and the floor of Grand Central Station in soaking wet clothes. I think summer always feels slightly endless at the beginning. But nothing lasts forever, and most things aren’t meant to.
So it was an eventful summer, to say the least. It held some incredible highs and some pretty low moments. Summers are always eventful. Busier than my school years in most ways, slower in others. There’s a sense of finality in the air of this last summer, for some reasons yet to be revealed to the general public, and some reasons yet to be revealed to even myself.
Writing this summer reflection from a coffee shop in Miami is somewhat comical to me. I’m wearing my bootcut thrifted jeans and my favorite brown leather platform boots, drinking a hot oatmilk latte on this first day of September, trying to emulate the feeling of fall (my favorite season), knowing I walked out of my house this morning to an 87°F day and might go to the beach tomorrow.
But seasons come and go, and we change along with them. As Canadian poet Tayna Davis sings in my favorite fall song of all time, “Eugology for You and Me”
“The clock is gonna turn back soon the season is already changing
We said goodbye for the final time and my room needs rearranging
The sidewalk is full of people and leaves and we’re all turning colors
I want more radiance and less green
This season is my perfect lover”
I hope all of you had a summer as lovely as mine, and that this fall brings you whatever hope for.
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