A Houston summer yawned before us. I hatched a plan. (Essay)

Dec 28, 2023

The view of downtown Houston and Buffalo Bayou.

With the arrival of June, the time had come for me to own up to the fact that I had planned nothing for my family to do this summer. No travel, no camps, no lessons: just months of Houston's thick, muggy weather, heat rippling off the concrete, stretching into August.

I thought of the lie I would have to tell when the pediatrician asked me if my kids’ daily screen time was under two hours. I was already fudging it with my affirmation that they consumed three to five servings of vegetables every day, and I wasn't sure how much more my conscience could take.

"No more TV until bedtime," I told my husband. "We’re going to hang out in the yard every night after dinner." (Dinners at which both my 18-month-old son and four-year-old daughter would eat full portions of zucchini without complaint.)

"‘We’ as in ‘you and the kids?’" he asked. And that is how my husband discovered a passion for staying in the air conditioning and doing the dishes.

I thought about the things that would make our time outside bearable — fun, even. Some citronella candles, a new tub of sidewalk chalk, some strings of fairy lights. I had always wanted an Adirondack chair — the fact that I couldn't pronounce it made me suspect that it was a sophisticated piece of furniture possessed by people more elegant than I. I imagined reclining in it while my children happily hunted for caterpillars and sprayed each other with the garden hose, a hose whose length would make me and my Adirondack chair just blessedly out of reach.

With a chair like that, my summer in Houston could basically be the Hamptons.

I found a set of two on Amazon — did my husband deserve his own Adirondack chair? I wondered. But what sold me was that it came with a matching side table. Would I be coated in a sheen of sweat all summer long? Indeed, I knew I would — but beside me, within arm's reach on my handy side table, would be a cold bottle of white wine, similarly glistening.

A coffin-sized box arrived from Amazon whose weight did nothing to dispel my morbid first impression. My husband dragged it into the house and promptly left for a business trip.

I sliced open the cardboard lid to see what I was getting into.

Both of my children eagerly volunteered to help. When offering support to others, it is useful to suggest specific ways one might be of assistance, and my toddler indicated his willingness to hide the bolts in the sofa, swallow the washers and smack his sister with the loose beams. My daughter had a clearer idea of what was involved in furniture assembly: that one hurls sharp tools anywhere on the wood with great zest.

I got the baby down for a nap and settled my daughter in front of her favorite Disney Plus shark documentary. I snapped the battery into the power drill and instantly felt a surge; I was a woman of power and strength.

An hour later, I reflected on the mendacity of the enclosed instructions promising a 15-minute assembly time – perhaps if one had an engineering degree! Suddenly I heard the padding of little feet coming down the hall. "I don't want to watch TV," said my daughter. "I want to help you."

"And that is so sweet," I said, "but Momma needs to figure this out herself." I have learned that small children's hearing and comprehension are at their height when snacks and treats are involved, and since that wasn't the situation here, she calmly crawled into my lap and picked up a wrench.

I braced myself, physically and mentally, for the tantrum that would ensue when I picked her up and returned her to the living room, and then I paused; sure, the process would be even longer and more complicated with her beside me, but maybe it was important for my daughter to learn how to grow into a woman of power and strength.

"OK, you can help." She handed me washers and nuts, spun the hex key around to tighten the bolts, held the pieces level, pressed the button on the drill.

One of the chair arms got attached upside down, we couldn't get some of the bolts flush, and I doubted the structural integrity of the finished products. But I reasoned that, in the event of a collapse, I’d at least already be pretty low to the ground.

After we set the chairs in the yard, my daughter plopped proudly in one of them. "We made them together!" she said.

Before I could sit in the other chair, her toddler brother shimmied up into it. Sweaty, I perched between them, on the side table where my bottle of wine should have been.

"I see a caterpillar!" said my daughter.My son, who wouldn't touch zucchini, gnawed a stick of blue sidewalk chalk. And a Houston summer stretched endlessly before us.

Elizabeth Chapman teaches English at Bellaire High School in Houston ISD.