The Summer of the Swans

“Life is like a lot of big and little steps. When you’re ready, you take the next step up.”

-Aunt Willie in The Summer of the Swans

Have you ever had a summer that felt a little different? Where work, play, and weather was not like other years? Where you wouldn’t have minded so much last summer, but this summer you felt sadder and more uncertain and you weren’t sure why. Your body was changing, your emotions, too. 

If this were a young adult novel published in the 1970s or 80s by a Judy Blume or Beverly Clearly, the synopsis would be something like:

“Katie Book was having the worst summer ever. She wasn’t getting enough writing assignments. She couldn’t land a full-time gig. And it seemed like everyone was too busy to have any fun. To top it all off, she was sure her perimenopausal cortisol levels were through the roof! Would the summer turn around for Katie or would it really be the worst summer ever?”  

In truth, I wouldn't say this is my worst summer ever. But statistically, as a 47-year-old relatively newly married step-mom and senior copywriter, it was. Statistically, I was in the trough of life satisfaction. Statistically, I am more stressed than a bio-mom, on my cognitive decline, and overwhelmed in my status in the sandwich generation. Some of this felt true from time to time — when the ennui settled in like humidity, then shifted from sunshine to thunderstorms like a fickle friend. With my unfortunate light workload, most days I couldn’t be sure if I was actually feeling ennui or just pondering it. That is what led me to remember The Summer of the Swans.

The Summer of the Swans is a 1970 Newbery Medal-winning young adult novel by Betsy Byars and a 1974 afterschool special. Goodreads recaps:

Sara's fourteenth summer was turning out to be the most confusing time of her life. Up until then, things had flowed smoothly, like the gliding swans on the lake. Now she wanted to fly away from everything — her beautiful older sister, her bossy Aunty Willie, her remote father, and, most of all, from herself.

I’d never read the book until this summer. But I do remember being at afterschool myself and having to watch the special. (This was on rotation with other 70s movies including Freaky Friday, Escape to Witch Mountain, and Candleshoe – even in the mid-80s).

On a recent rewatch Sara’s caretaker Aunt Willie tells her: “Life is like a lot of big and little steps. When you’re ready, you take the next step up.”

At the end of the movie Sara is on the phone with her estranged father when she realizes an assumption she’d made about him turns out not to be true. The scene switches to an animated pencil drawing of a stick-figure girl and a set of stairs. When Sara makes the assumption, a stair grows taller and insurmountable. But when she realizes she’s wrong, the stair shrinks to a manageable size and the girl scales it with a big smile. Then, a drawing of a smiling yellow sun appears. 

Isn’t this life? We make assumptions about people, situations, jobs we want. Some turn out to be true, some untrue, and some we’ll never know. The movie ends with Sara finally accepting an invitation from a boy to a party. Her braces-faced smile beams as she exclaims to Aunt Willie, “It’s been such a wonderful summer!”

You could say my summer was not unlike Sara’s. Labor Day weekend, often a time we feel pressure to have the best weekend ever packed with lake houses and grill outs to cap off the best summer ever, was actually a really fun weekend. I went for a sunny walk with one friend, had another dear old friend in town for a day, and went to a neighborhood pizza party where I knew more people than a similar party at the beginning of the summer. I even thrifted two Sweet Valley Twins books at Goodwill! 

This summer I’d planned to go on a writing retreat in France, but when an opportunity for a free Scandinavian and Baltic cruise came up, I went on that instead and cancelled the France trip. I got two freelance articles out of the cruise. Skipping the writing retreat meant I could join the neighborhood pizza party and step into a new part-time job. Steps down that became little steps up.

The new job is making charcuterie boards and helping out at events. I work with a small team of supportive women. There are not 20 “valued and diverse stakeholders” set to review and subsequently change my work all the while telling me how creative I am. In this new job, I create something and it goes out the door. I make something beautiful and, because it’s food, it brings people together. A step up.

I also taught my first writing classes in my home in June. By the end of the summer I’d scheduled two series of writing classes at local community centers. One class filled up two hours after registration opened. The other you can still register for here. Because I’ve been in contact with the admin of the two centers since winter, having these classes on the books doesn’t feel so revolutionary now. But, when I think about how I started doing this writing practice as a participant almost 10 years ago, to leading groups where I paid the Meetup fees, to taking the groups off Meetup but still leading them at no cost, it feels revolutionary to get paid to do a thing I love and to bring it to a new, wider audience. A massive step up after a series of small steps.

Some steps down became steps up. When I disappointedly cancelled my registration to an organized bike ride whose mileage was just too much for me this year, I learned of the opportunity to work at the event instead. Now, I will help prepare 800 caprese skewers and hand them out to cyclists. I am still in the community. I found a way to climb up after a step down. 

It feels a little juvenile to write about my silly summer. Yet it’s remarkable how similar a fourteen-year-old summer can feel to midlife one. Tales of a 47-year-old Nothing? Maybe it’s because I live two blocks from my preteen home. Maybe it’s the swirl of AI that has us wondering what’s real? But it’s hard to be a midlife lady in 2026, isn’t it? Maybe you’ve felt that way, too. Maybe someone invited you to a party and it took you a little while to finally say “yes.”

The other day I went for a long bike ride after meeting an old acquaintance about a potential new career path. I’d found my way back to her coincidentally through other new friends. This old acquaintance was helpful, hopeful, and encouraging. Coincidentally, the day we met for coffee was her last day in her former career. I said to her, “I feel like we should be having a cacao ceremony!” We didn’t have a cacao ceremony, but I did go for an extra long ride on the way home. Winding along the Capital City trail, fields on the left, sun flashing through a grove of trees on the right, I had a funny feeling – childlike yet wise. It wasn’t ennui. It was hope.