Slow down, summer

Am I the only one getting pukey riding this carousel of chaos, brightness, and fecundity?

As another summer reaches its fullest point, life bursts out everywhere. My tomatoes are rounding, my berries are as ripe as my armpits, and my overgrown garden runs a constant timelapse reel around me.

Here in Seattle, it’s been 84 years since it last rained, and these streets are showing it. The crows are greasier than Aragorn in the Battle of the Morannon. The grass could cut you, but it’s been painted in so many layers of unwashed dog pee that no one is sitting on it anyway.

My children are home every second, growing every second, and eating every second. I just bought $40 in snacks. For today.

Summer saps my energy in the way most people are hit by winter gloomies, but unlike those cozy short days when it’s encouraged to curl up and shirk all duty, summer’s hot blur means there’s always something wet to hang up, something sandy to shake out, and an empty ice tray that needs filling.

God, just look at these fucking guys. Photo by my husband, Todd Lininger, who loves summer.

I mean, there are certainly some things to love during this season of steaming pavements and frenetic lushness.

The bookends of these hot, bright days are divine. I wake up early to hear the birds losing their minds over summer’s many blessings. “We live!” They trill. “We fucking live again!”

I stay up late to walk when the world is in shade but light still dances over everything and makes it glow.

Summer’s gloaming really is hard to beat. I might even choose it over a rainstorm.

I’d like a summer gloaming rainstorm best of all, but I don’t think we make those anymore.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. Summers have become so unrelenting. Dry days used to give way to wet days and back again, but now it’s just incessant heat from May through September, peppered with wildfire smoke.

But this is not a climate change shitpost, or at least it doesn’t mean to be.

I’m trying to tell you something I’ve finally, finally learned about myself, in this, my 44th summer, just five days from my very midsummer birthday in what is supposed to be my season to shine but has always felt more like a protracted punishment.

I suck at summer. But that’s not my whole revelation.

I’m not good at summer because I get too caught up in its brightness and frenzy. I try to keep up with it, and I get grumpy when I can’t.

I get down on myself for needing so much rest when it’s light out, when the bees are buzzing.

These bees are not messing around. Photo by Todd Lininger.

Nature is unrelentingly doing right now, and my tragic mimic heart thinks I need to catch up.

Being in the PNW further compounds my own inability to just ride summer’s wave. Here in Seattle, further North than Minnesota or Maine, than even most Canadians live, our persistent grayness primes us to come into summer spring-loaded for action.

Summer is our time to shine, and we don’t want to miss a minute. Out come the paddle-boards and plans, the early morning sweaty classes and late night walks. The camping trips where you never sleep, never even stop moving.

Summer is more than a little manic, and I roll into July every year thinking I can harness that energy for myself if I can just keep up. I make plans to finish my novel and scold myself when I can’t get my creative energy together in the midst of all this brightness.

I’ve been doing it all wrong. Summer may be sprinting, but that’s just because winter shuts it all down, and all this life needs to be lived — and fast.

But I don’t shut down in winter. I come alive, my creative fire aflame from the first leaf until the earth gets soft again and life stirs within the soil.

Maybe summer is meant to be a muse. Maybe I’m just supposed to watch and learn. Lying in bed laughing as those birds sing out the sheer wonder of another bright morning. Squatting down close to those tomatoes and watching them balloon before my eyes. Stuffing my face with berries and lying down on that sharp, pee-stained grass, letting nature shimmer and simmer around me while I hold blissfully still.

My cherry tomatoes are so ready for August.