Helen Ellis’s Summer Must-Don’ts

This summer I’m not smoking a doobie. The last time I got high was the summer of ’22. It was July Fourth weekend, and a pal had sent me a mason jar of did-it-herself weed gummies with a Post-it note that read, “Just eat half.” I ate a whole thing. Then I ordered so much take-out Chinese, they delivered four sets of chopsticks. Then I got so high, I thought I’d been eaten by the couch. Then I threw up for two hours and my husband, Lex, called 911. Ten minutes later, I looked up from where I was slumped spread-eagle on the bathroom floor, gripping the toilet seat the way Sandra Bullock grips that bus wheel in Speed, to find Lex, two EMTs, and my building super standing over me looking concerned.

I said, “I’m going to die, but it’s cool.”

An EMT with a thick Bronx accent said to my husband, “She’ll be fine. We see a middle-aged white woman like this once a week.”

This summer I’m not getting my body bikini ready. My body hasn’t been in a bikini since I was forty-eight. It was the summer of 2018 in Panama City Beach. My skin was so pale, a kid pointed at me and hollered, “Paw-Paw, is that a mannequin?”

My abs-of-steel days are over. I invested the money I would have spent on a gym membership in a three-hundred-dollar Shan brand suck-it-all-in one-piece that makes me feel like a Bond girl’s well-maintained aunt. I’ve worn it for seven years, only (at most) twice a year: when I was either tromping around a water park daring cooties to come and get me, or laid out at a Las Vegas pool under the shade of a sixty-story resort tower in between World Series of Poker events, under an umbrella, under a sun hat so big it can be seen on Google Earth, with a hardback spread across my lap like a gynecologist’s “modesty sheet.”

This summer I’m not going to my friend’s house in the Hamptons or my friend’s house in Seagrove Beach, Florida, because I never go to these houses, because I don’t want to sit around in my one-piece in front of their husbands. I spend my Julys instead trolling eBay and Etsy for dead women’s Christmas ornaments—summertime is when adult children clean out Meemaw’s attic and hawk her Shiny Brites online. It’s also fake-Christmas-tree-sale season. In the summer of 2024, I nabbed a Vickerman nine-foot prelit silver tinsel fir for half price. It looks like an A-bomb landed in our living room, and I’m still bragging about it.

“This summer I’m not doing anything “because you only live once.” I’m not climbing up anything “because it’s there.” I’m not jumping off anything “because if I don’t, I might regret it.” (I will not regret it, I assure you.) The last time I peer-pressured myself into doing anything physical was back in the late nineties, once when I strapped on a pair of roller skates and once when I got on a bike. Skills I’d honed as a kid at the Merry-Go-Round Skate Center and Montclair Circle cul-de-sac during my Tuscaloosa childhood did not come back to me. Both incidents ended with Lex standing over my crumpled body going, “You’re okay! You’re okay!”

This summer I’m not sampling seasonal delicacies like Connecticut lobster knuckles and whatever spider rolls are—they show up every June on sushi menus in New York City. I am showing off my gold-medal Southern fruit-picking abilities at a hoity-toity grocery store on the Upper East Side. Yes, that’s me motorboating the honeydews, thumping cantaloupe butts, squeezing peaches in an awooga, awooga! clown-horn fashion, and proudly staggering home with the heaviest watermelon I can find in my arms like a 4-H prize pig.

This summer I’m not sitting on a porch or running through my yard sprinklers, because in Manhattan I don’t have either of these things. I’m not tending to my hydrangeas or shooting empty green bean cans off a log, because, alas, I don’t have a garden or a gun. What I do have is a born-and-bred ability to while away the hours that comes from spending enough summers in the South. I have putter power. I like my privacy. You read it here and only here, folks: This summer I’m not posting anything I do or don’t do online.