How Summer Feels
Just a short dispatch for you this week. Just a few things I’ve been thinking about.
It’s finally, officially summertime, also known as my favorite time of year. I love the heat, I love being in the water, I love tomato and peach season and cooking with summer produce. And, of course, I love hosting.
For me, summer has always been the season of entertaining. I don’t know why, it just makes more sense to me. I feel lighter in the summer, more open to possibilities, activities. Summer is the season when things happen, when things could happen. I daydream about dinner parties and potlucks and day trips and time in the pool and the river and stargazing and beermosas and Stiegl Grapefruit Radler (though I still can’t manage to find any in town).
It also seems to be, unfortunately, the season where things most often go wrong.
Money runs out of me like blood from an open wound in the summer, with no extra income to staunch the bleeding. My house feels like it’s boiling and the AC units drip water down the walls. The bugs come back in droves, the drain flies and the gnats and the regular flies and the ants, who for some reason are just as attracted to cat food as they are to anything else. I’m never not overwhelmed these days, but the summer seems to pile everything on with no intention of stopping. Or maybe that’s just the oppressive heat that invades half of my house.
Good things always come with the bad, I suppose.
Summer, to me, feels like a combination of things beginning and things imploding. New ideas, new endings, new relationships, the deaths of old ones. Nothing is calm in the summer. There are too many things swirling around in the air at once.
Though the beginning of summer excites me, I’m not sure if I’m ready for it this year. I feel strung out and stretched thin, not prepared for whatever opportunity might come my way or whatever may come to an end. I think of how I felt this time last year, what I was excited for and how I was spending my time, all the things I wanted to do and never got to, all the opportunities I squandered. Somehow, things feel worse now than they did this time last year. I took a week off from work and rested and read and even wrote a little, made plans for new projects and came back refreshed and relaxed. All that evaporated in the span of two days back in the office.
It’s hard to muster up any excitement for the summer. My birthday is in a week, and the normal anticipation I feel isn’t there. It’s hard to feel hopeful for anything good to come my way.
But even so.
I am clinging to recipes for tomato tarts and peach salads. I am clinging to fish frys and nights hammered on the Fenian’s balcony. I am clinging to time in the water, to being back in the pool swimming laps. I cling to the people I love and the few cucumbers growing on the vine in my garden. I cling to the books I’ve been picking up, to the ideas I’ve been feeding privately and the ones I’ve been circling for a year or more.
I hope for a house filled with people this summer, for activity and excitement and good-hearted gossip. I think that’s as much as I can hope for for now. My father always says I should be better at managing my expectations, and I guess I can tell him that boy am I trying.