Collect or relax?

With the arrival of the Memorial Day weekend, many collectors put their coin collecting aside in order to pursue summer interests.

For collectors who live in the wintry climate of the north, this is understandable.

It is a rare chance to get outside and shed our pale skin tone for something that looks a little bit more healthy.

However, I cannot help but remember when I was a kid and experiencing my early years as a collector.

The arrival of summer meant that I did not have to go to school.

This freed up enormous amounts of time. Part of it I used to collect coins.

On some summer mornings before my friends were out and about, you could find me bicycling to the bank to obtain some coins to search.

I might get there just after the bank opened, I was so anxious to get on with the numismatic adventure of the day.

Sometimes when the mercury was well past 90 degrees and the humidity was even higher, after I had exhausted myself outside, perhaps after coming home from swimming, I might have a stash of coin rolls saved for this very moment to search quietly in the cool of the basement.

Summer reminds me that numismatics was never my whole life, but it was an important part of my life.

I could tuck it into times of the day when and where I could.

The end result was I had a great deal of fun. I learned a lot. Yet my summer was still packed with the sort of outdoor activity that you would associate with being a kid.

So my message here is that you should not forget numismatics during your summer.

Go ahead and do as I did and find a little time to spend with your coins.

You won’t regret it. I never have.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is winner of the 2014 Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."