I lose June every year and it makes me sad. It’s when we start the registration for the 
fall conference and one thing leads to another and WHOOSH! the month is gone, with nothing to show for it, but pixels on a computer screen. This year I was a bit more productive. In addition to beta testing a new website, I applied for a work in progress grant, completed a non-fiction book proposal for a publisher and wrote the first chapter of a YA coming-of-age novel. Not bad. Not bad at all.
The June of the station wagon packed with summer shorts, sweat shirts and swim suits, tents, sleeping bags, beach towels, camp stoves, lanterns, coolers, is the one I can’t get back. We were two families, the Hannicks and the Burketts, of all girls. Moms and daughters taking off for vacation, fathers to follow on the weekends. We would leave directly from school, uniforms, shoes and shirts carefully packed up and put in a special bag not to be seen for three months. A couple of hours drive north of the San Ferenando Valley and we were there, Carpenteria. Twelve miles south of Santa Barbara. Mrs. Colburn’s restaurant with THE most amazing lemon chiffon pies.
June Gloom they call it now, cool, foggy, damp. We camped right on the beach, supposedly the ‘safest in the world’, the deep didn’t start until about a mile out. You could body surf those waves forever. Sitting on the picnic table, gritty with sand in every crevice of my body, I think I was happiest. Nothing called me but the now.
We use a lot of clichés now. They are posted all over Facebook, clever sayings, adages. We go way beyond the Farmer’s Almanac or Ben Franklin or even Shakespeare [although Will did memorialize pithy sayings with a bit of panache] Back then, we used the thumbnail comment with considerable caution, today, not so much. Memories almost demand the succinct, but no. Because each memory is different. It’s all about Point of View.
June. Run everywhere. Hair out-of-control curly. Fingers water-wrinkled. Skin sun-pinked painful. Food grilled. Parents relaxed. No getting up time. No going to bed time. Fourteen books every two weeks from the Burbank Public Library returned early. Summer.