Summer: Requiem

Frank tells me the news at bedtime, as I snuggle sheets up to my neck, burrow my ear into a pillow, and find another to clasp into the concave curve between my belly and knees.  So sometimes I get a weather update just as I’m drifting off to sleep.  He also runs headlines and weather probabilities past me as I’m waking up; this morning I learned, as I shuffled to the closet, that supposedly today would be our last hot day.  “For how long?”  I asked.  “Forever?  For a week?   Is summer over?  They’re probably wrong; they’re almost always off.  By a day, or a month, or a week.  We were supposed to have storms last weekend; we didn’t.  We still haven’t.  What do you think?  Do you think summer is over?”.  And I shuffled out of the room to make breakfast for school-bound children.  Parenting taking precedence over weather musings.

If summer isn’t over for the meteorologists this week, it is over for my kids.  Like whatever killed the radio star, the beginning of school kills summer, and it is sad.  My spirits sank abysmally the first few days of school last week.  They (my spirits) were still sulking over the weekend.  I had a deep sense of endless possibilities coming to a premature, even tragic end.  Most of which (endless possibilities) we had been idly wasting, June through August.   Temperatures continued in the 90‘s as Meisha and Nora biked to and from school, and Maurya was asked to Homecoming, and Ezra lamented his aging junior high’s inhumane lack of air conditioning.  The heat seemed a stifling mockery to me, and, I think, to my kids.  Maurya looked at me with pleading blue eyes (blue–the color of deep summer) yesterday and said, “I’m tired of its being so hot.”  Ironically, when she came home from school today, just this minute as I sit here typing in fact, she sighed with flushed cheeks and said it again, “I’m tired of its being so hot”.

Yes.  Well… but then, there is Indian Summer, following Summer’s demise.  Maybe Maurya’s eyes aren’t the blue of deep summer.  Maybe they are the blue of Indian Summer.  Which Indian Summer means, to me, a late afternoon drive to the fruit stands that line Willard’s main road.  Pettingill’s and Paul’s (it is harvest time, oh glory day).  Paul’s is more laid back, friendlier, less likely to snap at you for picking out the best apricots (yes, apricots are that late this year).   And their tomatos and peppers are abundant.  Indian Summer means open windows in the house, morning and evening.  Today, the morning breeze through windows dried my wood floors almost as fast as I could mop them.  And I love the quietness in my house when I’m cleaning it, and the deep, intimate privacy of a lunch all by myself (ok, Jane Austen was invited yesterday) in a gleaming, sunlit kitchen.  Also yesterday, I lugged the ladder in from the garage and re-arranged paintings in the dining room.  Making room for new ones I’d done this summer.  Actually, all summer, the paintings were only half-hung in the dining room anyway.

I sweep up Summer’s crumbs in September.  Start thinking about soup in October.  Breathe in the final green of trees.

But this is Summer’s Requiem.  What can I say about Summer?  There was Hawaii, which I loved.  Summer is perpetual there.  How would that be, to live in summer always.  The question seduced me while I was there; it haunts me now that I’m home again.  There were days at the pool with Nora and a book (I’m still not done with “War and Peace”), quiet, easy days.  Nora’s cornsilk blond hair turned green with her first exposure to chlorine.  There were magnificent thunderstorms, the kind that only this valley, with the lake nearly abutting the craggy Rockies, can produce.  Feral, Wagnerian.

Ice cream cones, homemade fruit smoothies.  Green smoothies too; Frank discovered agave nectar and spinach leaves and chia seeds (remember chia pets? ch-ch-ch-chia).  Lately, corn on the cob.

And Shari made an appearance this summer, just a week ago.  This is the second summer where Shari played a major, in-person role.  She and her daughter Acacia flew to Utah to get Acacia checked in to BYU (early, for honors classes).   Those were moments both sweet and not so much; it was beyond delightful to have Shari’s company (she is a dear friend) for so many days; we talked about everything (fact: women need each other, if only for the sake of good mental/psychological hygiene).  It was intense though to watch Shari watch her oldest daughter’s initial launch.  I both felt for my friend, and I couldn’t help but remember my own slightly bungled/anticlimactic launching—and my oldest daughter’s (cataclysmic, to me).

There was Girls Camp, a lovely, hectic event which ended with Maurya’s early departure (asthma attack) and me cleaning up with a cold sore in the corner of my mouth (sure sign of deepest stress).   I love and honor the women and girls who I worked (and played) with at camp.  There was the Dirty Dash, a euphoric, hilarious, and nearly obscene 5K that friends invited me (and Maurya) to run with them…through nasty, stinky mud puddles (one extensive marshy spot featured a large rotting carp at its edge).  There was the bunny infestation, repetitively.  There was flooding (a pipe broke in the crawl space, hissing as it sprayed the subfloor under the master bedroom; my pine floor buckled temporarily, and then settled back down again in the heat of July). There was a hike with all the girls up Waterfall Canyon.  It was a beautiful destination, so worth the sweat.  And a hike with all the girls back down Waterfall Canyon, where thankfully no one besides myself was hurt; I slid on loose rocks and fell, tearing something in my knee; it is still not recovered.  I haven’t been able to run for almost a month since.  Therefore, there was also very brisk walking (exact denomination given for 4mph walks by my i-phone app, RunKeeper Pro) which morphed into dancing when I felt fairly certain no one could see, or at least no one was looking (I sound all private about it; Meisha and I do revel in dancing together, and I have great hopes of recruiting Ez; I caught him dancing alone in the kitchen today).  In those solitary places on my solitary very brisk walks, places where I could break into more liberal rhythms, I discovered currants here and there along the gravel road, both black and gold.  Yes, gold currants.  I thought, because my memories of golden currants are so….vintage—long ago snatches of long ago hikes with my parents as a little girl, and because I haven’t been able to find gold currants at nurseries or fruit stands, that I had invented them in my faraway childhood, that they had become a proprietary myth, along with the weasel-cum-wolf that scared my sister and I half to death in Providence before I was old enough for kindergarten.  But now I’m sure: gold currants do exist; they are growing wild, adjacent to fields of grass and alfalfa within a mile of my house (which distance I know for real, thanks to RunKeeper).

And I will end my requiem on that note: the mystic golden currants.  I tasted them each time I passed; sweet, tart, both mellow and pungent, smooth…and full of seeds.  They are real, but they are gone now; I pinch myself and my memory to keep hold of them.  Gone without a trace, even the leaves of their scattered bushes fading invisibly amongst the other wild things growing rampant through the farmer’s fences.

Adios, mes amies.