It’s summertime here, finally, and it means that we’re discovering again what was our normal life in Hawaii. Sweat, heat headaches, water (sprinklers instead of the beach), and the long long days where 830 hits and it’s still almost as light as day. But because we left Hawaii in March, it’s like we pressed pause on our constant summer, and so we’re getting to see and do it all over again with new eyes. Back to the feeling of it being almost unbearably hot even though three months ago we were in winter coats, back to disaster if we forget deodorant. (Not that I would ever do that.)
We don’t have the boys in school yet, but the days still feel suddenly carefree anyway, even though it’s not a break from something. They still feel sparkling, like a drop of warm water down the edge of a watering can, they still feel heavy and substantial like the humidity under the bright noon sun. We worry a bit less about dirt (although we never worried about it much), because there’s more of it, and the boys come in streaked, from the garden or the ‘dirt box’, as they call it, where they dig with their trucks.
Or, in the quick summer storms that start with thunder and end with sprinkles on the driveway, they run outside and throw themselves down, belly first, in the puddles, for some reason that we adults have now forgotten.
The fully leafed trees branch out against the pink sunsets and the dragonflies buzz above the pond, and these days feel like bright bursts that slip past with just a flash of darkness in between. How the days can pass so quickly when there is so much daylight is a mystery of the summer, maybe a mystery that every summer holds, and it is about this time when we all start to wonder how it is summer, how it is June again already, halfway again to Christmas, halfway again through the yearly season dance.
We race barefoot through the crisp green grass and count the fireflies as the darkness falls, and these are all small mercies that we forget so often, that we get to remember again every summer; the small bright beauties that cluster around us every day. The spring flowers change to summer ones, the strawberries need picking and the raspberries start to bloom and the mulberries crush and stain beneath our bike tires, and sometimes in the length of these bright days, in the heat of this bright sun, we take everything in and forget to notice it, forget to notice the whole world quivering and alive around us, every breath of air, every single raindrop.
The pink sunset starts to fade to darker blue and the air outside quiets each night, but by 4am a few birds will be starting their sweet song again, so early, even through the closed screened windows, a sound that, in my confused early morning mind, makes me wonder when birds sleep, if they do, and how, when they insist upon announcing the setting of the late sun and the rising of it again so early.
The beauty of the winter is that one flower, one bright frost, one fresh snowfall reminds us of life, reminds that life is more perilous and delicate than we could have imagined, but summer is not this at all. It rushes past us with all its vibrant life and we cannot manage to capture it all, not even a little, and sometimes all of it makes me just a little tired. Maybe we feel exhausted because the days stretch on forever and the birds are maddening in their early morning gladness, and we start to feel like it’s just a bit too much for us, because I need more sleep than the sun is getting.
And so, I admit it, I’ve yelled at that early bird a little in my head, and sighed at how late the darkness sweeps past my boy’s windows, and gasped at the heat that has grown the tomatoes and the irises. But when the long summer surprises me again with its constancy, it always provides the beauty to make up for it.
Comments