Sommer Duenow

Summertime in the late 80s.

Warm air moved through open windows while my parents slept in their bedroom, the television still playing in the background.

School was out and I was awake long past any reasonable bedtime for an elementary kid. Not every night, but often enough that the memory turns a few nights into a season.

I’d watch the streetlight at the end of our driveway, the way it would cast shadows across everything it touched. Other times, I’d listen to the trees moving with the wind in the woods, behind the houses across the road from us. 

The whole world outside my bedroom was still.

I loved that feeling.

It felt private.

It felt like I’d found a hidden room inside ordinary life and all I had to do was lie in my bed, look out the window, and exist in that strange little hour where nothing was expected of me.

When I wasn’t lost in shadows and light, I‘d listen to music and imagine myself older. Not old, exactly. Just grown up, whatever that was, which seemed impossibly far away and glamorous. 

I had no real understanding of adulthood, so my ten-year-old brain imagined it mostly in colors and motion, like in movies or magazines. I pictured postmodern high-rise apartments with white leather couches, pastel walls, and shiny glass tables…

A convertible, obviously.

Maybe a stick shift, because that seemed like the sort of thing a grown person would know how to drive. And I’d imagine myself driving to some exciting place like New York, hair blowing in the wind and sodium orange lights flashing by as I drove off into the night.

That actually feels kind of strange to admit.

It was a very specific version of freedom a child invents before she knows about mortgage or grief or parenting or exhaustion… I didn’t know yet that adulthood wasn’t one long summer drive with the windows down.

Childhood is rarely perfect, and mine was no exception, but there were nights when I still believed that future was waiting for me, like some romanticized movie I would just step into.

But I wasn’t in New York City. 

I was in my bedroom.

I feel lucky that my parents let me make my space mine, with very few constraints. People would probably call that dopamine decor now, though nobody really had a term for it, back then.

Music mattered. 

Color mattered. 

Ambience mattered. 

The soft bedding, the perfectly warm reading lamp clamped to my headboard and all my best plushies chilling in a net hung in the corner. 

All of it felt important because I was still young enough to believe the things around me had something to do with who I might become.

I think about that a lot, when I see videos about growing up Gen X. 

Our old toys. The houses, the kitchens, the clothes. All the wood paneling and strange shag carpet colors. And the music… Holy fuck, the music!

People post these little fragments and suddenly I’m not just looking at someone else’s memory; I’m standing in the doorway of my own.

And I feel that ache.

Not exactly sadness. Not grief… More like reaching for a place that’s gone, but also maybe never existed in the way I want it to have existed.

Because I don’t want to go back to the 80s.

Not really. I know too much now.

I know the decade itself wasn’t as innocent or full of wonder as I thought it was. And I know the adults in my life were carrying their own worry and private hurts.

But from my bed, with the windows open, it all felt simple.

Everyone was where they were supposed to be.

Morning would come, and the people I loved most would still be there, cooking breakfast and planning Saturday afternoon trips to the garden center.

These days, I sit by a different window at night while my own little family sleeps, and I can still feel some piece of that old feeling.

The house goes quiet. 

The day finally loosens its grip. 

No one needs me for a minute. 

I can sit in my little dormer, look out at the dark, and feel tucked safely inside while the world keeps moving without me for a while.

It’s odd because I’m much older now than the version of myself I used to imagine.

That also feels strange to admit.

But I still have my window and the part of me that wakes up when the rest of my home is asleep. I can still feel, for a moment, like time has folded in on itself…

The trees across the road.

The streetlight at the end of our driveway.

And remembering what it felt like to believe that everything ahead of me would be beautiful simply because I wanted it to be.