I tend to romanticize summer. The movies and TV shows I grew up with made me think that the season was about adventure and big-time transformation.

I imagined myself building a tight-knit friend group and getting out of a pickle together, like in The Sandlot or Camp Nowhere. Or traveling across the world, say, to Greece, like Lena Kaligaris, a character in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, having a whirlwind summer romance and returning an entirely different person.

I’ve never actually had a summer like that.

Even when your expectations are more modest than mine, “so often, the summer just flies by, and we haven’t taken the picnics or gone for the day trip or whatever it was that we thought we were gonna do,” says happiness expert Gretchen Rubin.

Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and host of the podcast Happier With Gretchen Rubin, has been sharing ideas on social media about how to make the season more memorable and satisfying.

She walks through four exercises to help you get what you want — and more — out of the season. Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).

🍑 Give your summer a theme

Pick a single word or phrase that you want to embrace this season — something that captures the feeling you want to have over the next few months.

“My theme for the summer is ‘ketchup,’” Rubin says. “It has a kind of a summer feeling, because you think of putting ketchup on your burger.”

“It’s a metaphor,” she says. It means to look for “whatever I could add [this season] to make something elevated and more fun.”

Meanwhile, my theme word this summer is “juice.” I no longer think that I need to travel far or completely transform to have a delicious summer. I just need to take advantage of the abundance that the season offers: ripe peaches and tomatoes, juicy softball pitches and the opportunity to feel juicy in my body when I wear a bathing suit.

Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).

Malaka Gharib/NPR

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Malaka Gharib/NPR

🪣 Create a summer bucket list

What do you want to do this summer? On my bucket list: ride the Ferris wheel at a summer fair, have more barbecues at my parents’ house and see the sunrise at least once.

Night is falling in Altadena as bats circle, peacocks wail and photographer Kevin Cooley tries to capture what’s left of a tree.

Using strobes and a long exposure time to allow the maximum amount of available light to hit his lens, Cooley snags about 50 shots of the 20-foot-tall tree, which stands vigil over a street where nearly all the homes burned. The tree’s limbs were lopped off in the wake of January 2025’s Eaton fire, which ravaged Altadena and part of Pasadena, but all these months after the fire, there’s new growth on the tree.

Little tufts of green leaves have emerged from the raw cuts where the burned branches once were, proving the tree to be more resilient than its otherwise relatively stark exterior might suggest.

A fine art and news photographer for decades, Cooley, 51, is using pictures like the one he snapped of the tree as part of his new project, “In the Gardens of Eaton.” A collection of 6,000 photos and counting that Cooley has taken around Altadena on wild lots where homes once stood, “In the Gardens of Eaton” aims to capture bits of natural beauty that have endured despite the ravages of the fire and its aftermath.

Cooley has lived in Altadena since 2000 and he knew his neighbors well. He started working on the photo project several months after losing his home in the fire. He’d enlisted a group called Samaritan’s Purse to come up to his lot, where he’d found a metal flat file he’d used to store his photographic prints. Cooley was hopeful some had survived, but when the group popped it open, he says it quickly became clear that the burning metal had acted somewhat like an oven, burning almost everything inside to a charred crisp.

A ponytail palm on Athens Street photographed for Kevin Cooley’s “In the Gardens of Eaton.”

(Kevin Cooley)

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One piece Cooley could identify, though, was a 2020 copy of Wired magazine for which he’d shot the cover. It featured a swirling plume of smoke, accompanying the story “The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works,” and the irony wasn’t lost on him.

“You could still kind of make out the word Wired across the top of the masthead and something about that just blew me away,” Cooley says. “It’s as if the whole thing had come full circle. I immediately wanted to photograph it in the same way I had originally photographed the smoke, which was in a studio with lighting, and I guess that made something click for me. I started feeling like there was a way to make something positive after the fire, and that’s when I started spending more time back in Altadena.”

Driving around town, looking at the lots and the wreckage, Cooley says he started to notice the bits of nature that were trying to persevere. He spotted a begonia poking through a burned fence on his neighbor’s property and snapped a photo, and soon he was accumulating more and more similar images. Cooley says if you’d told him before the fire he’d be taking so many pictures of flowers, he’d have scoffed, but now images like one he captured recently of a group of blooming roses in front of a cluster of dead vines remind him that perseverance is possible no matter the odds.

Cooley stands in front of some of his photos on display in a gallery in Culver City.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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“It’s inspiring what nature is doing up there,” Cooley says. “We live in this environment where fire is very much part of the ecology, but people’s gardens are also pushing through. Nonnative species and native species are both there. And people are planting more wildflowers, and it feels cathartic. It’s making me excited to rebuild too, because I really can’t wait to get back.”

Letizia Ragusa, an Altadena resident who lost her home, says Cooley shot her flower-filled lot without her even knowing it. Before the fire, her yard was a wonderland of 16 fruit trees, a koi pond and both a vegetable and an herb garden. All of that was lost in the blaze. As a method of coping and of shoring up the land, Ragusa enlisted a Sierra Madre company called Hardy Californians to plant a remediation seed mix across her lot.

El Molino geraniums captured for Cooley’s “In the Gardens of Eaton.”

(Kevin Cooley)

Seeing the native plants and flowers begin to pop up on her lot was important, Ragusa says. She’s been living in a rental with her family since the fire, and there’s no yard or room for a garden.

“It’s just really comforting to me to have some sense of control when everything else feels so out of control right now,” Ragusa says. “At least I have this little piece of land that I can plant things on and I know it’s what’s going to happen. It’s very predictable, and I also think it makes other people happy. I see people driving and walking by that stop to look at it. And our neighbors have all commented on it too, so that’s nice.”

The pictures Cooley took on Ragusa’s property were of rows of pink and purple native flowers and sunflowers set amid city lights and a dreamy sunset. Ragusa says they’re surreal and beautiful.

“It’s outdoor photography, but with a studio element,” she says, noting that she’s especially open to Cooley’s process because she’s an artist herself, previously producing ceramics and sculpture from a home studio that she also lost.

Cooley works sets up lights for a recent photo shoot.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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While the initial photos Cooley took of her yard were from the street and her driveway, she’s since given him permission to go deeper into her lot. It’s something Cooley says is important to him because he knows firsthand that a lot of people’s lots are what he calls “hallowed ground.”

Most of the pictures Cooley has taken so far have been from a distance, though he has set up his equipment near the end of people’s driveways to get a good photo. As word of Cooley’s project has gotten around Altadena — with one resident posting a photo of him on their lot captured via trail cam to a local Facebook group, looking for more information — more and more people have expressed an openness to having him come shoot their gardens.

Honeysuckle on Via Maderas captured for “In the Gardens of Eaton.”

(Kevin Cooley)

Cooley has created a Google Form for interested residents to use and he keeps a spreadsheet of the responses in a clipboard on his car’s dashboard. When he’s at a loss for what to shoot next, he’ll glance at it, mentally mapping out addresses in his mind and looking at resident-submitted descriptions of their lots, which include phrases like “We don’t have much left, but we saved our banana plant” and “[Our house] made me into the gardener I am and I adorned her in plants.”

Cooley says he intends to shoot photos for all the owners who have responded to his Google Form, hoping to gift them prints when the project is complete. Starting in July, he’s headed to Portugal for a six-month art fellowship, but says he plans to continue the photo project later. Cooley would also like to produce an art book of his favorite photos from the project.

He’s also aware that, in some respects, he’s up against a time limit in terms of what he can shoot. He says he spent the beginning part of the project “rushing against the Army Corps” as they were clearing lots, and now he’s trying to photograph rough-and-tumble lots full of nature before their owners level them and start to rebuild.

Calaveras roses photographed for “In the Gardens of Eaton.”

(Kevin Cooley)

Sometimes, Cooley says, he had to shoot on lots where he hadn’t known the owner. When he started the project, he made an effort to track down who lived on the property before he set up his camera, but the process was surprisingly arduous and he’d often lose his intended shot as flowers or plants died or changed shape.

“It wasn’t practical,” Cooley says. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, but I just couldn’t figure it out. I will eventually, though, and then I’ll be able to present people with a photograph when they’re back in their new homes.

“I just think Altadena is a special place,” he says on a spring day. “Six months ago, it was so depressing to come up here, but now it’s not. It’s still emotional, of course, but seeing all the rebuilding, it’s clear that people see value in being here, even now. When all this is done, if Altadena is even 50% or 75% as special as it was before, it’ll still be great.”

Wendell Pierce says there’s a joke actors have about the five stages of their careers:

“There’s ‘Who is Wendell Pierce?’ ‘Get me Wendell Pierce.’ ‘Get me someone like Wendell Pierce.’ ‘Get me a younger Wendell Pierce.’ And then the last and final and fifth stage is: ‘Who is Wendell Pierce?’” he says.

After starring roles on The Wire and Treme, and a 2023 Tony Award nomination as the first Black actor to play Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, Pierce is working as hard as ever. He says he’s motivated by the “ticking clock of mortality” — but also by the desire to challenge himself as an actor.

Though many entertainers shy away from the label “journeyman actor,” Pierce proudly embraces the term: “It’s not just to go from job to job, but [to] be intentional about the jobs I take,” he says. “I try to do the trifecta, as I call it — television and film and theater — every year.”

Pierce currently plays a captain on CBS’ Elsbeth and a CIA officer in the film Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. He’s also starring in the Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Othello in Washington, D.C.

Pierce likens tackling Shakespeare to detective work. First, he says, there’s the “mining the text for all of its understanding and everything that Shakespeare is telling you not only about the characters, but how to portray them and what’s happening.”

More than that, though, there’s also the emotional aspect of connecting with the character — and the physical and vocal strength required of a three-hour production. “The challenge is physical, it’s intellectual, and it’s emotional, and that’s the great thing about doing Shakespeare, and even specifically doing Othello,” Pierce says. “I always think of these … iconic roles and large roles like the beginning of a hike up Mount Everest.”

Interview highlights

On how many years ago, jazz helped him crack the code on Shakespeare 

I went to the club to hear Arthur Blythe, a great alto saxophonist. And he’s pretty avant-garde, but he had this really hip, swinging tune. I was humming along with it. And then he went into his solo, which was free and wild and all over the place. And I was just looking around the club, still humming the song in my head. And when he finished his solo, we were right exactly on the same note in the melody of the song.