Summer By Wendi Rank
It’s summer.
You’re thinking iced tea, right? Warm evenings on the deck? Maybe the ice cream truck circling the neighborhood, the brittle tinkle of its song repeating until your eardrums bleed?
Sorry. I’m – I’m not feeling the summer.
You see, in two incredibly short months, my daughter leaves for college.
A plane ride away.
Did you hear me? A plane ride away!
And it’s not like I’ll see her while she’s still here. She’s traveling and working and volunteering and –
Ugh. This is so hard. Why didn’t anyone tell me she’d actually leave someday?
And the last few weeks – they’ve been so stressful. Did you know she’s been driving on every bridge between Pennsylvania and New Jersey?
And on the Schuylkill?
And on the Blue Route?
“This,” I said to my husband, “is going to kill me.”
He laughed. Laughed! “It’s good for her!” he said.
Can you hear my “harrumph!” from where you are? Probably. I’m still harrumphing.
The last few weeks of high school found our daughter completing an internship in New Jersey.
Which – I’m going to really complain here – another thing nobody tells you is the only way for your child to get to New Jersey by car is for her to drive over a bridge.
A bridge. A bridge! Suspended over water! I’ve seen The Mothman Prophecies. Those things collapse, like, all the time.
And that’s before we’ve even discussed the other drivers. The other maniacal, aggressive, completely bananas drivers barreling past my baby on I-95 like there’s a cash prize for arriving first.
On her first morning of commuting to New Jersey, her GPS took her over the Betsy Ross Bridge.
She was aiming for the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Her route home was again hijacked by her GPS. This time, it was the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.
Worse, she had an appointment in Royersford. Rather than stopping home so I could see that she was, in fact, alive, she decided to drive straight to Royersford from Jersey.
On the Schuylkill.
I don’t even drive on the Schuylkill.
Who among us can drive a road with a precipitous drop on one side and some bizarrely placed land mass on the other?
My daughter, apparently.
After the Schuylkill, my kid was on the Blue Route.
Then 422.
I was apoplectic.
But when she walked in my front door, the wisdom of West Side Story echoed in my head.
Stay loose, boy.
Breeze it. Buzz it. Easy does it.
Just play it cool, boy.
Since you just can’t argue with West Side Story, I played it cool.
“How was your day?” I asked, the very picture of nonchalance.
But inside – inside I was a roiling mess. In twelve hours she’d be right back on 95 and the bridges.
“How am I going to make it through three weeks of this?” I wailed to my husband, a bag of cookies in my hands.
But I did. I made it through three weeks.
Then her internship site asked her to volunteer over the summer.
For four weeks.
So not only is she leaving in eight weeks, but for four of those weeks I’ll have only “boy, boy, crazy boy, stay loose boy” stopping me from a complete meltdown?
Eh. At least it’s not the ice cream truck music.
I’ll take it.
