The Summer Yes List
Something shifts in me the first real warm week of summer. I stop negotiating with my to-do list and start saying yes instead. Small things, mostly. But they add up to a whole season if you let them.
So here is what I am saying yes to this year.
Yes to eating outside. Every dinner I can possibly get away with, hauled to the table with Chad and the kids and whatever significant others wander in that night, the light going gold while we linger longer than we meant to.
Yes to bare feet in the grass before the day asks anything of me. Coffee after that. I know, I know.
Yes to the roses. This is my first year growing them, David Austin climbing roses I planted in old whiskey barrels right outside the greenhouse, and I keep walking out to look at them like they might vanish if I stop paying attention.
Yes to the dahlias, a gift from Shannon at Fox Cottage Farm. She sent the tubers one grower to another, just because we both love this, and I am almost certainly babying them too much.
Yes to walking next door to say hello to the goats and the sheep and Daisy the pig, for no reason other than it makes me happy.
Yes to the long evenings. To leaving the dishes. To one more chapter, one more lap around the garden before the light gives out.
And here is the one I did not used to say yes to. Yes to slowing down. Living with chronic illness has taught me, the hard way first and then the good way, that nourishing myself is not indulgent. It is the whole job. I used to think quiet luxury was a look. It turns out it is a Tuesday with nothing to prove.
Here is the thing about saying yes to small things. It is not lazy and it is not nothing. It is how I stay inside my own life instead of sprinting past it. The big stuff will still be waiting in September. The roses will not.
And come mid-summer, the yes I wait all year for. A long walk along West Meadow Beach, Stony Brook at sunset, near my parents’, the kind of evening that hands me back the best parts of my own youth. That is the whole list, really. Less rushing. More lingering. More yes.
If summer is calling you outside too, go. The list will keep.
Meet me out there.
With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie
Yes to everything you wrote about here!
The choice is intentionally saying yes vs. being on autopilot and saying yes because you don't think you have an alternative (or it is easier than saying no - which it isn't really but we trick ourselves into thinking that).