When you are young, summer is non-stop fun: visiting a family cottage, sailing on somebody’s boat or just spending a day at the beach. Fun, fun, fun!

It’s only as you get older that you realize: Somebody had to put a lot of work into those places before the fun could begin. And more and more — that somebody is you.

I have lowered my sights. All I wanted was a barbecue. After a long, exhausting week, I thought a barbecue for friends would be a nice way to relax.

I could not have been more wrong.

First, there was deciding the menu. Burgers are easy to eat, and cook, but not so easy to make, unless you use the pre-made patties that I can never find in the store when I want them. Steak is too expensive, fish falls apart—that leaves chicken.

I remembered a recipe a friend of mine used, a marinade with ginger and soy sauce, and decided to try that one. So I ran to the store and bought chicken cutlets and salad fixings, and raced home to start the marinade.

Oops! I forgot to check my spice cabinet before I began. Halfway through the recipe, I ran out of soy sauce and ginger. Back to the store. Oh, and olive oil. And Ziploc bags to marinate the meat in, because that really works much better than the Corningware my mother used.

Finally, the food is prepared and waiting in the fridge. Time to go out back and check on the table and chairs.

Here’s something else I forgot — I haven’t used this furniture since last summer or cleaned it. Everything’s filthy and dusty, and needs hosing off. Which then means it must also be towel dried, by hand, as now there isn’t enough time for it to dry in the sun. This step would be great for developing biceps and abs — if I had any.

Now, where is that charcoal grill? It was somewhere in the garage when last seen, also last summer — but we’ve had a contractor making that garage his center-of-Casa-Judy-operations since then, and nothing is where we left it. At last I find it, sitting in a corner, under a stack of rakes and snow shovels. (Truly, a garage for all seasons.)

It is another hour before my two boys — whose simultaneous visit home I am trying to celebrate — think to ask if we still have any charcoal briquettes.

“Don’t tell me I have to go back to that store again for charcoal? Or anything else? They’ll be putting my picture up in the entrance….”

“Don’t worry, Mom, we can get it all.” And they’re off to the store.

I finally unearth the tablecloth I always used for that picnic table. I remember cleaning it before putting it away, but somehow there is still a sticky patch of ketchup or barbecue sauce. (“Or maybe it’s blood” remarks my spouse, with far too much glee in his voice.)

The table is ready, and not a minute too soon, because here are my friends, with chips and appetizers (thank God, because I had forgotten all about those) and lemonade. “Oh. Ice!” I yelp. It’s only thanks to the miracle of dawdling that my sons are still in the store when I text them to get a bag of ice. They have remembered the ice cream and the beer all by themselves. (No, not to be served together.)

We are finally all sitting down, mouths watering for delicious barbecued chicken. This is the point at which I remember that I threw out all the paper plates to make room for toilet paper, at some point during the pandemic. So we all troop into the kitchen, each carrying out an actual china plate and silverware to the patio, “the better to eat with.” It’s rather a hike, out a side door and then around to the back, since this house was not designed to be barbecue-friendly.

Nor, when you boil it all down, am I. Oh, I loved the final result — with my two boys running the grill and all of us having fun. But it was exhausting.

I never thought that just “relaxing” could be so much work. In fact, I’m all “relaxed out” and will remain so until this time next summer, when I will forget how tiring this was and will therefore go through it all again.

Some people never learn.