THERE’S AN IMAGE from one of those summer boat trips we took with my friend Becky and her family when our kids were young that always haunts me this time of year.

Orcas Island, late August, walking along a lane above the water. (Somebody was probably complaining their feet hurt.) But what stays with me is seeing (I almost wrote “seaing”) the sea through a scrim of pear trees dotted with small, pale green, teardrop-shaped fruits with the deep turquoise-blue sparkle of the sea behind them.

For me that remains the perfect image of this particular moment in the year, poised between two seasons—not quite summer, not quite fall. Endings and beginnings mixed bittersweetly together, and in the midst of all this change, the only certainty: that you will not be able to stop it. Summer and its sweet flowers will slip away, the days will shorten and cool, and before you know it, we’ll be thinking about Christmas.

I don’t have a photo of the pears with the sea behind them (cellphones with cameras were not yet ubiquitous and in some ways that’s probably just as well. Would I remember it so clearly if I’d taken a photo?) And though it’s been years since I was on Orcas, the image stays with me, what Virginia Woolf might have called one of my “moments of being.” It’s like the moment before the loss—the moment when the sun is shimmering and the fruit is almost ripe; the moment before decline and decay will have their way; the sea will darken and the fruit will fall and, though you know that spring will eventually come, it will seem for several long, long, long months as though darkness and death have won.

I always look forward to summer, probably more than any other season—yearning for flowers, sunlight, long days, and the carefree feeling that comes with being able to move life outside. But maybe I have too much of a melancholy streak in me to truly be a summer person.

And, as I come to the end of it, I’m realizing that the truth about Summer 2024 is that it hasn’t been the best one ever. It’s been too much about obligation and not enough about fun. I’ve been working hard on the new novel and I don’t think I planned enough fun to balance that out. It’s also true that Kurt had Covid for a week at the height of summer, and even though I escaped it (this time), it still clipped my wings. (Thank heaven the Olympics arrived to keep us sane with a virtual trip to Paris just when we needed it!) And I’ve been dealing with plantar fasciitis, which is sooo boring, but the reality is that nothing clips your wings like not being able to walk without pain.

Sometimes I think summer is the trickster season of the year. It appears to offer so much—that illusion of endless time and light and perfect outdoor meals—but it doesn’t always deliver. And like everyone else in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve spent too many summers feeling cheated because the beauty and warmth and light I spent nine endless months longing for doesn’t come when I want it to or last as long as I think it should.

At least the damson tree has lots of plums this year!

Maybe the truth is that summer comes with too many expectations—that it will always be carefree, fun, sunlit. Why do I feel as if nothing bad should be allowed to happen to me or anyone I love in the summer? But this summer ended with a memorial service for a beloved pastor gone too soon and the loss of a dear friend’s sister, which effectively shattered that illusion. There are enough dark, gloomy days in the year to deal with death—can’t it suspend itself while the sun is out?

And why does it have to happen now, in the turning of the year when it feels like everything lovely and beautiful is slipping away and it’s way too easy to remember that all flesh is grass, and that the grass withers and the flower fades and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it? And it feels like you have to say goodbye to everything you love—warmth and flowers and light—and somehow find the strength and courage to embrace the coming darkness again.

I keep thinking of a stanza from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, Dirge Without Music:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

[Find the whole poem here.]

Though I am a person of faith and though I know that Jesus Christ has prepared a place for me in heaven after I die, I still hate death. The wrongness of it, the feeling that this is so not how it was meant to be, never goes away. I’m right there with Edna: I know. But I do not approve.

And I am not resigned.

I always think of Shakespeare’s lines from Sonnet 18 this time of year too, because “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” The idea of summer as something that is only “leased” to us, with an end date always implied, is so perfect and I love that 400 years later, we can still relate. And as a writer, I especially love the idea that he will offer his beloved immortality and preserve her beauty for 400 years in a few lines of poetry:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st, (read that line aloud and notice how brilliantly he slows time with his word choice),

            So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

            So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare takes the ultimate writer’s revenge and preserves her “eternal summer” in poetry. And maybe, in this transitory world, that’s the best we can do. Because though she (whoever she was) died long ago, her eternal summer—and in some mysterious way, through hers, ours—lives on.

As I watch the leaves on the vine maple outside my window drifting down while I write this, somehow that comforts me.

And in my memory, those baby pears still hang suspended above that sparkling deep blue water–the perfect image of this in-between season—and that comforts me too.

 

Featured image by Hanne Hoogendam on Unsplash

Damson photo: my own