How Many Summers Left?
I do not love hot weather. I do not love intense humidity and stepping out into the outside world and feeling myself gasp. And, for better and for worse, I live in Washington D.C., where this is how it is in July and August.
On the other hand, my grandmother turned 90 years old this year. I hear that the summer right now in the Portland (Oregon) area is beautiful, and that she and the many people that I love there are really enjoying it. Savoring it.
One of my mantras is “Life is for Living.” Living, as fully as we can, as compared to surviving, or enduring. So I try to find ways to embrace experiences that I could all too easily grit my teeth and bear. So even though a part of me would love to hide out the hot days inside in the air-conditioning, we are going camping with friends this weekend. Outside.
Earlier this week I shifted my thinking about the summer from weeks and months to seasons. When I think about the summer as a whole season, I think about the way we yearn for it to come in the long nights of winter. I think about all the particular enjoyments of summertime — lemonade and long evenings, neighbors outside, thunderstorms, fireflies, ice cream.
Perhaps because of all the intense talk of mortality, racism, violence and death earlier this week, or perhaps because of thinking about my grandmother enjoying her 91st summer, I asked myself a question I can’t know the answer to, a simple question that is also hard to ask: “how many summers do I have left?”
I find this a powerful question. It makes me pause. I have no idea. I certainly have hopes for many, many more summers, in good health and with people I love and enjoy. But I don’t know. And just asking the question challenges me to notice what is special about this day, this week, and appreciate it. Asking the question propels me to treasure life, to savor the mess of camping gear piled up in our living room right now, to acknowledge my worries about heat and our family as indicators of how much I love these people and care about them. Seasons are big enough that really, in the arc of our lives, we don’t get to really savor all that many of them. And so I ask myself again: “How many more summers will there be, for me?” I hope there are many, even hot and humid ones. We will come up with some fun and messy water games on this camping outing, I know it. We may well drive around in our air-conditioned car to get the baby to sleep in the 100 degree heat index, and if so, we will be grateful for our car, our modern convenience and our privilege to own it. And along the way we will be savoring our lives, grateful for another day, another hot and, yes, splendid season on this earth.
Into the Summer Daze
photo by Heather Rion Starr
We want summer to be leisurely. We want it to be restful. We want it to involve sandals, long meandering days, the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass, a steady stream of lemonade or ice tea.
We don’t, usually, want it to involve more to-do lists and travel details than the winter holidays. And most of us don’t want it to fly by, though we all acknowledge that it does.
What is just one of your hopes for the summer months? I am asking myself and my family that question these days, as we charge full-bore into a busy summer. I suppose it will fly by, but I am not at all a hot-weather person and I live in Washington D.C., so it’s just fine with me if it at least scoots along pretty quickly. I am looking forward to particular moments of various trips—moments I can already imagine myself wanting to freeze and grasp and hold. And I am also a little overwhelmed by all the details of traveling with a toddler. “It’s an adventure, it’s an adventure, it’s an adventure,” I keep telling myself, but if every day is an adventure, when do we get to relax? In the hubbub of summer activities, when and how will we pause and breathe and do what feels most summery to me: savor our lives, in all their fullness?
Photographs are one way that I savor the beautiful moments—I love taking photos and I love going over them, looking through them again and again, making cards and books from them. I’d like to figure out some other, more familial, interactive ways to pause and savor together as a family and as the groups of families, friends, colleagues and communities that we will be dancing in-and-out of this summer. What do you do to savor the summer?
August: The Year’s Midlife Crisis
I think August is the midlife crisis month of every year. At least here in Minnesota, this is the time when things I haven’t done begin to loom around the edges, saying, “If not now, when!?” It’s hot and sticky here, but the days are getting shorter, and we all know where we’re heading. Mortality calls us by name.
I was driving down the street yesterday and saw a treehouse. Not a fancy treehouse, not an amazing treehouse, just a pretty basic backyard maple tree treehouse. To my shock, upon seeing it, I burst into tears. Happily, I was alone, and not in heavy traffic, so I could pull over and get my bearings.
As I cried, what was running through my head was that it was suddenly, inarguably, completely and utterly clear that I would never be building my own kid that treehouse she once wanted. She is 16 now, breezing by occasionally in between the events in her complex social calendar. If I built her the fanciest, most spectacular treehouse on the planet, she would glance out the window, say, “Thanks!” and continue on her own way.
It’s not that she begged for a treehouse when she was younger, or even particularly wanted one. It’s not that I didn’t give her other cool things, or experiences. It’s that the window has closed on that possibility, and on the whole Mom-as-center-of-desire-fulfillment stage of her life. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that she doesn’t cozy up like a toddler when she wants something, usually money or permission to do something. But in her life’s soundtrack, I am mostly the background music now, not very often the plot or the dialogue.
I know that’s just as it should be, and still I sat by the side of the road and had a moment. A moment of grief and loss, a moment of clarity that it is time for me to redefine my own life, refocus my own days. Then, as I pulled myself together, a sense that there is some joy and excitement in that refocus. The regrets are real, but the pull of life’s new possibility is much stronger.
Regrets come to me in surprising way. One morning, stacking dishes into the dishwasher, I ached with regret that I had never spent time on Ebay searching for particular dinner plates that my father said once, in passing, he liked. I still regret that I didn’t give him a college sweatshirt—I know that he wanted one the Christmas that I was 19 and he admired the one I had one myself, but I told myself I couldn’t afford the twelve bucks to get him one of his own. For God’s sake, I think now, with all that money he shelled out!?!? I finally went back for a college reunion years later and sprang twenty bucks for a college t-shirt, which he received politely, but with no visible enthusiasm. I found it, clean and unworn, when I cleaned out his dresser after he died last year.
I don’t know if this is true for other people, but the regrets that I have are much more about things I didn’t do than things I did. I’ve done some really stupid things. Careless things, wreckless things, inappropriate things, occasionally something downright mean. I’ve made huge mistakes. But forgiving myself for those is somehow easier than forgiving myself for the things I never did. The trips I haven’t taken, the risks I looked away from, the conversations and relationships I avoided.
So, in this final stretch of summer, I am thinking, what will I regret if I don’t do it now? That lake down the street that I mostly just nodded to in June and July? I’m in it every day now. The garden, so easy to visit superficially? I’m diving into it now with my whole body, not caring a bit how filthy I get. My days have a mantra: grab summer now! This is your moment! Stop lamenting how hot it is and have some fun!
Summer Solstice
It’s always felt a little strange to me that summer begins at the solstice, the longest day of the year. Shouldn’t the longest day mark the middle of summer, the high point from which we begin the long slide toward winter? And yet, from here the days get warmer, if not longer, the grass drier, the trees dustier. Our children have not yet begun to get bored (with any luck), and (with any luck) we are moving toward times of vacation and respite, not looking back on them.
Somehow the summer solstice manages to be both a beginning and a mid-point, the start of the line and the apex of the curve. But isn’t that just the way of things? Don’t beginnings, middles and ends turn out to be far more muddled than we ever imagined? The loss of a job feels like the world is crashing to an end, but turns out to be the seed of a new career. The beginning of high school turns out to be the end of childhood. The middle part of our lives is already arriving when we feel like we’re just starting to catch on to what it means to be married or a parent or a person with a career.
And, of course, the endings, middles and beginnings all overlap. We become passionate about a new hobby at the same time that we are comfortably in the middle of a career path, or we welcome a new baby as a parent is coming to the end of their own life. Only in the calendar to we have the chance to neatly mark the seasons, to declare when exactly one thing starts and the other leaves off.
In fact, what the calendar does is merely to assign names and numbers to the fact that change is part of the natural order. The seasons will move along in their predictable courses, but on any given day the weather will probably be hotter or colder, calmer or stormier than you might have expected. Making patterns is what we do in hindsight. Living is what we do in the moment, dealing with the elements of each day as it comes along.
But the choices we make in each moment are what build the patterns, what allow us to look back and say “That was the summer of my life.” The poet Marge Piercy writes:
We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.
Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth's curve
but whose destination we can now alter.
May this summer solstice find you on a road toward your heart’s desire.
Summer and Sabbath
My thirteen-year-old daughter and I have different ideas about what it is that she will be doing with her summer vacation, which will be upon us in a few days. I think that the summer before she enters high school would be a good time to get a jump start on subjects she finds challenging. Also a good time to learn to type properly, or play the piano. Not to mention that there are a good number of household projects that could use some manual labor. I know that she will be bored with the vacant hours, and I have warned her repeatedly that her days will not be spent in front of the computer or TV screen.
And I keep asking her just what it is that she expects to do this summer. What is it that her days will look like when she is not off at camp or visiting an out of town friend? All I get for an answer is that she doesn’t know – and doesn’t want to be asked.
She doesn’t have a way to say it, but I think what she is looking towards is sabbatical time – a Sabbath of the school year where she can, to paraphrase Whitman, loaf and invite her soul. She wants to be free from pressure, free from schedule, free from things that have to be done and other people’s expectations that she do what other people think is good for her. That’s what the Sabbath is for. It is a time of forced openness, when you give up work and see what remains. Outside of the structure of daily life your soul gets a chance to stretch out.
OK, I confess I’m a little scared to see what remains for my young teen outside of her structured life. It’s hard to trust that her soul will be well served by weeks of openness. But there’s something to be said for being bored, for sitting with the emptiness long enough that something from deep inside might come to fill it. There’s not that much to be said for being the mom who has to listen to the whining that accompanies that boredom until that mysterious something comes along, but I guess that comes with the territory.
There isn’t any magic formula that decrees how much of our lives needs to be given to work, or to improving our selves and the world around us. But the tradition of the sabbath and the sabbatical teaches that a seventh of our time is not too much to give our souls the space to expand. I’ll let you know how it goes.