When you’re young, and still locked inside the tyranny of a school year, you are never the less privileged in a way that only a young mind would fail to notice. Focusing on the daily, dull drudgery contains the mind, enslaving it to the notion that life is boring and unfair. Days agonizingly pass while you’re not allowed to stay at home playing Nintendo or riding bikes. But eventually, and always eventually, summer rolls around.

Each year, as the snowy fields gave way to greener landscapes and sunnier dispositions, we could smell freedom. March relented to April, and soon May arrived, bringing with it an almost uncontrollable urge for release. The welcomed spring temperatures were matched entirely by an air of hope and excitement.

But much is lost in the transition to adulthood.

When you grow up, you are thankful that daily threats of looming homework fade away, along with nagging parents who would scold you for watching television immediately. But what also fades away is this notion of a measured year, a scheduled break. No matter how weary you were, how burned out tests and classmates made you, there was always that proverbial end in sight.

Now, the arrival of spring merely signals the addition of outdoor chores to the list of those still undone indoors. And if you’re unfortunate enough to not have any vacation planned, there doesn’t seem to be much hope or excitement in the air as once used to be. The jittery legs and wandering minds from childhood don’t have much purpose or direction. Yet another sad reality of being an adult, another thing that I wish I took for granted less as a child. Goodness knows I would gladly trade homework time to have that end-of-May finish line back. Gladly.