Summer

Summer is a recurring temporal frame in the book: it is the season of Kay Willis’s formative childhood crisis, the period in which family life could become most crowded and demanding, and a setting for later change. Across these memories and reflections, Summer is less a decorative background than a test of how time is used. It can hold illness, work, study, travel, family closeness, or the deferred promise of a life that is always supposed to begin later.

Childhood Illness and Fear

Summer first appears as the season of a mystery illness that overtook Kay Willis when she was eleven or twelve. The illness lasted all summer, and a high, spiking fever in late August sent her to the hospital for five days. Recovery did not immediately restore ordinary life: after her energy returned, she was left with an overwhelming and irrational fear that she would be kidnapped.

The fear was shaped by the radio dramas of the period. Kay imagined a criminal with a bullet wound forcing her father, a doctor, to remove the bullet at gunpoint, and she lived in terror for more than a month. Her parents were repeatedly summoned home when she became inconsolable. The summer therefore becomes a memory of physical depletion turning into imagined danger, while her mother’s patience and eventual conversation provide the season’s emotional counterforce.

Kay’s mother could not guarantee that kidnapping would never happen. Instead, she contrasted the remote possibility of catastrophe with the certainty that fear had already consumed the summer. Her counsel was to appreciate the time the family actually possessed rather than sacrifice good moments to imagined disaster. Summer consequently establishes one of the book’s central temporal ethics: uncertainty cannot be eliminated, but the present can still be received as a gift.

Summer and the Crowded Family

Summer also belongs to the first intense phase of Kay Willis’s motherhood. Her children arrived in rapid succession: JoEllen Willis in April 1951, Kim Willis in August 1952, Patty Willis in December 1953, Maureen Willis in May 1955, Fran Willis in October 1956, and Jeane Willis in February 1958. The sequence amounted to six daughters in seven years, a scale of care that made exhaustion and confinement tangible rather than abstract.

Pregnancy sickness made the demands of that period especially physical. When nausea became severe, Kay and her daughters played a game called EMERGENCY. At her signal, the girls stopped what they were doing and sat still so they would not get into danger while she waited for the sickness to pass. Their childish understanding of an emergency vehicle became comically literal: they associated an emergency with their mother being sick to her stomach. The summer’s broader meaning is thus connected to the repetitive bodily labor of early motherhood, where family routine had to adapt to a mother’s temporary incapacity.

The book’s account of maternal time makes clear why such seasons could feel both joyful and entrapping. A mother’s day may stretch to sixteen hours, producing a nominal work week of 112 hours. Its tasks divide into cleaning, cooking, shopping, transportation, medical appointments, homework, discipline, school involvement, work, and telephone time. Summer does not release the mother from this structure; it exposes how family time is assembled from countless overlapping obligations.

Rest, Work, and Transition

Against this pressure, Kay’s mother created a practical summer-like principle of renewal throughout the year. She insisted that Kay take every Thursday afternoon away from the children, arguing that exhaustion impaired judgment and that even obvious solutions disappeared when a mother was burned out. The weekly absence was expected within the family, and Kay returned recharged. The arrangement made rest part of family life rather than a reward granted only after every duty had been completed.

Time away from home could also be restorative when shared with another mother. Kay traveled with Marilyn on craft-buying and selling trips, helping pack a van, haul merchandise, set up displays, and eat lunch in a booth. The work did not feel like work because the two women exchanged personal thoughts and laughed as they covered the miles. Their later trips, now made first class, retained the same result: Kay reentered home relaxed and refueled. Summer’s value in this pattern lies not in escape from responsibility but in returning to responsibility with energy restored.

Summer further marks Kay’s movement from full-time motherhood into paid work. After more than twenty years as a full-time mother, she sought part-time employment when Danny Willis began school, two children were already in college, and the family needed additional income. She accepted a position overseeing luncheons for eight to fifteen people in a private dining room at United Nations Plaza in New York City, working from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. with excellent compensation. The job’s unusual combination of commuting, limited hours, and higher pay made it worthwhile despite the expectations of suburban motherhood at the time.

That work grew unexpectedly. Kay noticed the expensive pies supplied by local caterers and negotiated an exchange: she would bake a cake in return for taking a pie home, rather than accept a free pie that seemed dishonest. Her homemade pound cake was so well received that she began preparing desserts every day and then was offered the entire luncheon assignment. Summer therefore carries a second kind of transition: domestic skill, initially exercised for family and a small personal treat, becomes a source of income and professional possibility.

Time as Possibility

When Danny Willis was about nine, Kay took a summer evening course at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She had left college during her sophomore year and had not been eager to return to study, but university staff urged her to accept free tuition connected with her grant and the university’s sponsorship of Mothers Matter. They regarded her participation as a way to model possibility for the mothers in her program and for her staff.

The course, Women in Transition, was part of the graduate curriculum, and Kay initially lacked the formal qualification to enroll. Her persistence secured an exception. She received three graduate credits without paying the $900 fee, arriving on the first night with a stenographic pad and pencil while her children teased her for trying too hard to look like a student. The summer course turns time into a threshold: the mother who had spent decades organizing other people’s futures briefly occupies the role of student herself.

This transition supports the book’s larger warning against postponement. Many adults say they will pursue their own interests someday, but that time remains indefinitely deferred. Kay argues that timing matters in parenting and that time can be an ally. If the average woman lives to eighty-four, she may spend more of her life without her children than with them. Summer, in this sense, is not merely a season that passes; it is a reminder that family stages are temporary and that postponed desires may outlast the circumstances that made them meaningful.

Family Memory and Seasonal Meaning

The book links summer with the conditions that make family memories possible: fewer interruptions, more shared time, and a loosening of ordinary schedules. Holidays and family vacations rank among the most frequently recalled happy childhood memories, not because of expensive presents or particular destinations, but because families work to create a happy atmosphere and because fathers are often present while mothers have more time for play. Calls, meetings, outside demands, and ordinary interruptions recede.

That account places Summer within a broader contrast between quantity and display. Adults generally remember care, attention, love, and time rather than elaborate purchases or programmed experiences. The seasonal setting matters because it can make sustained presence easier, but the remembered value lies in the emotional atmosphere created by people, not in the market value of what they buy. The family’s holiday trips to F.A.O. Schwarz in New York City, with hours spent among toys and a descent down the store’s large slide, embody this principle: the durable memory is the shared adventure and attention, not simply the merchandise.

Summer therefore gathers the book’s opposing temporal forces. It recalls a child trapped in fear, a mother managing six daughters in seven years, a weekly practice of recovery, an unexpected route into paid work, and a return to education. Its decisive significance is that time remains morally open: the same span can be wasted through anxiety, exhausted through unexamined obligation, or transformed into laughter, learning, income, companionship, and memory.