I love the smell of sunscreen. It reminds me of going away on vacation, of being hundreds of miles away from the responsibilities of your personal and professional life. Of course, I had to remind myself as I applied the sunscreen to my legs on that August afternoon, this wasn't a vacation. We were merely going across the street to hang out at our neighbors' pool for the afternoon. Well, we weren't really hanging out the neighbors.
We had moved onto our street the month before, and at 31 years old we were by far the youngest couple on the block. Our neighbors across the street were a nice couple in their mid-to-late 50s with grown children. When we moved in and met them, my husband Mark mentioned that he was looking to re-finish the deck on our front porch. Our neighbor Phil suggested that his recent college graduate son could come by and do it for us for cheap. He was moving down to New York in September to start his first real job, but in the meantime he was looking for anything that would get him a couple bucks during his last few weeks home.