The summer everybody scattered post

I woke up this morning in a tiny little camper, next to my wife, with this almost overwhelming sense of gratitude.

I just laid there for a minute taking it in. Andrea next to me. The quiet. The particular smell of a camper in the morning that somehow takes me back through every summer we've ever spent like this.

We've been doing some version of this for a long time.

So many of my summers are tied up in camping. The very first one was our first trip as a married couple, just me and Andrea, when a chipmunk climbed into our car and more or less adopted us. We named him Cheddar. He was a good chipmunk. After that the years blur together in the best way. Northern Michigan with Andrea's family. Charlotte learning to ride her bike at a state park. Evan as a little guy absolutely demolishing a carton of blueberries and somehow ending up dirtier than I knew a child could get. Pushing Hazel on a swing on the beach as the sun went down over Lake Michigan, the whole sky going pink behind her.

Camping has just always been woven into who we are.

I told someone the other day that there's nowhere on earth I'd rather be in the summer than Michigan. This state has something magnificent about her, and in the summer she shows it off. The sleepy little towns along the west coast of the lake that suddenly come alive. The beaches that don't seem like they should be that beautiful. The funny little restaurants you'd never find unless someone told you.

Something happens to us Michiganders when summer finally lands. Some of us come alive right along with it. I genuinely can't picture living somewhere it's always sunny, where T-shirt and shorts is just the default all year. That's somebody's actual reality and it baffles me. We get a few short months, so we throw everything we have at them.

This week we're camping with our two closest family friends and all their kids.

Except here's the thing I keep noticing this year. We can barely get everyone in the same spot. One of the kids is in Uganda. Another's away at an internship. One of mine is hustling at a vintage clothing festival, selling his wares. Another had work last night back home. At some point this week we'll all actually be together, and it'll be loud and perfect. But it's not like it used to be, when they were little and they just went wherever we went.

It caught me a little off guard, honestly. These kids are becoming themselves. Leaning into who they were made to be. And as much as some quiet part of me misses the days when the whole crew just piled into the car on command, it's an honor to watch them grow into actual people with actual lives.

I just didn't expect to feel it this much from a camper this morning.

All these kids call us aunt and uncle, even though there's no blood between any of us. We chose each other, which somehow makes it count more.

One of my favorite memories with this whole crew happened a couple of summers ago. I wanted ice cream. The kids wanted ice cream. The other parents were less enthused, on account of us having already had ice cream the day before. But I've never been convinced there's such a thing as too much ice cream.

So I loaded every last kid into our van, which may or may not have had a seatbelt for each of them. Listen, I grew up riding in the back of pickup trucks after T-ball games to go get ice cream. We survived. I drove that giddy, over-packed van full of other people's children to get cones, and somewhere along the way one of them called me Uncle Dad.

It stuck. It still gets used here and there, and every single time it does, my chest gets a little full.

That's what these weeks are. We laugh until it hurts. We put our feet in the water. We catch frogs and fish. We eat way too much. And I get to be Uncle Dad for a few more summers while everybody's still close enough to pile into the van.

So wherever you are, whatever your life looks like right now, I hope you find a little time to stop and look around. To be grateful. To soak up whatever beauty is sitting right in front of you before the season changes.

Happy summer. It's finally here.

Grateful for you,
Ryan

P.S. I'm mostly unplugged this week, on purpose. If you reply and I'm slow to write back, it's because my feet are in a lake somewhere and there's a kid yelling at me to come catch a frog. I'll get to it. Promise.