The full Flower Moon hung low over the garden, and the white blossoms seemed to glow with it. It was Memorial Day night around the fire pit, and my character Kat was sitting between her sister and her best friend, bracing for the question her nieces had been working up to all evening: what happens now?
Kat’s life had just come apart in the way lives sometimes do — with a slow realization that the future she’d planned for twenty years wasn’t going to happen. So when her teenage niece, mouth full of campfire hot dog, suggested she make a bucket list — “like what the high school seniors make before graduation” — it landed differently than a teenager might have expected.
Her best friend Jess caught the spark right away. Not a someday list. Not travel-the-world, climb-a-mountain, win-the-lottery. “Let’s keep it real,” she said. “Small stuff, things we can actually do.” Things to finish before Labor Day. Before their birthdays. Before this strange, hard summer turned into fall and they’d let it pass them by.
That’s the kind of bucket list I love.
There’s something about a full moon and a fire that makes you honest. In the scene, Kat’s aunt Gertie calls it the Flower Moon — “a turning point that leads us into the brightest part of the year. Time to let go of what’s holding us back, make room for new beginnings.” You don’t have to believe in tarot cards (Gertie does, enthusiastically) to feel the truth in that. Summer is the brightest stretch of the year, and it goes fast. A bucket list is just a way of refusing to let it pass unnoticed.
The trick is keeping it real. When Jess pushes Kat to name what she wants — just for her, not “make everyone happy” — Kat surprises herself. She doesn’t ask for anything grand. She wants to ride horses again, the way she used to before life got busy and someone else’s preferences crowded hers out. That’s it. A small, true want she’d shelved for years.
That’s the whole secret to a summer bucket list that you’ll actually finish: it’s not about the biggest, most Instagrammable adventures. It’s about the small, true things you keep meaning to do and never quite get to.
A few prompts to find your own list:
• What did you love doing before life got busy? (For Kat, it was horses. For you it might be swimming, painting, a porch and a paperback.)
• What’s one honest conversation you’ve been putting off?
• What would you do this summer just for you — not for anyone else?
• What’s a small adventure that’s actually doable before Labor Day?
• Who do you want beside you when you do it?
Some real, doable summer bucket list ideas to borrow:
Watch the next full moon rise. Eat dinner outside once a week. Learn to make one thing really well — a pie, a cocktail, fresh strawberry jam. Pick your own berries. Go barefoot in the grass. Reread a book you loved at seventeen. Take the long way home with the windows down. Write the letter. Make the call. Sing the song (more on that one in a future post — Kat and Jess have a song, and it’s a Journey classic).
In the novel, Kat’s list doesn’t fix everything. Her marriage is still ending, her mom still won’t go get her almost-certainly-broken ankle X-rayed, and August is still uncertain. But by the end of that night around the fire — daisies thrown in the flames, glasses raised to new beginnings — something’s shifted. She’s decided to really live the summer instead of just surviving it.
That fire-pit scene is from Summer in the Moon Garden, my cozy novel set in the small town of Criss Creek. If you’d like to meet Kat, Jess, and the wonderfully meddlesome Aunt Gertie — and you happen to enjoy a story with recipes you can actually cook — you can read the opening chapters free below.