I’ve always enjoyed the summer. The warm weather meant that I had no need for jeans, and while I couldn’t use my collection of sweatshirts (that my parents claim I have too many of, but can you really have too many sweatshirts?) I knew that I could wear them inside when the house got a little too cold or on the airplane to Iowa to visit family for the Fourth of July. My family and I used to go to Okoboji every summer for the full duration, driving halfway across the country in three days to make it in time for the sailing season, the trunk of the car packed, and our two small dogs on our laps.
When my older siblings grew too old to continue sailing a 16-foot-long sailboat called an X-Boat, and too busy to spend the entire summer up there, we changed our trip to one centered around the Fourth of July. This is usually the only time our extended family is all in one place, packed into my grandparent’s lakehouse. Instead of working for the sailing school as an instructor, my brother got internships, and my sister started working as a lifeguard (I did, too, after a little).
The lifeguarding job was mostly for high school students and college students home for the summer, often taking on more of a leadership position as opposed to a normal lifeguard. Since the summer was the on-season (reasonably, with kids out of school and the hot weather) for the pool and winter, fall, and spring were considered the off-season, the operations of the pool shifted to accommodate the time of year. There were more guards on duty during the summer, with an added recreational swim to the usual two sessions of lap swim. There was weekly training for the staff to keep skills up to date, and events were held throughout the summer for staff bonding. One such event was a scavenger hunt with challenges that ranged from swimming a vaseline-covered watermelon across the pool and then smashing it on the ground to figuring out which small shot glass had Coca-Cola in it instead of soy sauce. It was a good time, running around the downtown area trying to figure out how to go about finding the things on our list. Since everyone was around the same age, it was easy to become friends with everyone if you didn’t already know them from school.
While my summers weren’t filled with vacations and mall trips, working at the pool with a bunch of my friends from high school was just as much fun (usually), and I was able to make some spending money for the times I was able to go shopping or go on a vacation. So my best advice to you is to make the most out of the summers you still have–whether that’s shopping with friends, road-tripping across the country, or finding a summer job.