We seem to be in a lull this morning. Earlier there were lots of birds singing and chattering and carrying on, but now everything seems quiet, even the cicadas see to be slow starting. You can hear the ubiquitous sound of lawnmowers in the background but they are not close at had, which is good because today is Mikayla's day off and she is feeling under the weather. I was hoping she would get to sleep late, but in the summer you are often awakened at ungodly hours by yard crews trying to beat the brutal heat of the middle of the day. And if I did that work, I would do the same thing so there is no way you can even be annoyed by it. If we did not have the Hernandez brothers come at least every couple of weeks in the summer, our yard would look a LOT worse, because, while my husband has great intentions, the work is really just too much for him now, even though he is battling the cane because the crew, in their fifteen minute mowing and edging and blowing, just don't want to deal with it and will only trim around it, and I don't blame them for that either. Three of them do the yard so fast, one to mow, one to edge, and one to blow and bag if needed. They have that routine down to a science. In the front they use the big riding lawnmower they got last year, but in the back with so many trees they really use the weed-eater mostly, we don't have that much grass by this time in the summer . . . too much shade now.
In the summer, when we were kids, days lasted forever, even though the summer seemed to melt away fast as ice cream, each day seemed an abundance until we were called in at dusk. Sometimes, we would sit out on the trunk we used for a step and watch the fireflies slowly filter into the yard, and occasionally we'd catch them in jars to put on the dresser between our beds. And in the night, Mom would come and retrieve the jar and let them out, if she remembered we had them. Some mornings they were still there crawling around the leaves we put in for them, their long slender bodies dark in the daylight, their beetle wings closed. This morning's poem is a young girl's remembrance of summer evenings . . .
Young
A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
Anne Sexton
I recognize how this feels even though our circumstances probably couldn't have been more different, it's the summer, when you are beginning to know you are going to change, but before you have done it. The summer where everything is just the way it should be, even for just a little while. Where you are in that pause between seasons, both the world's and your own, where it has been summer long enough to be relaxed into it and not so long yet as to be boring, where your body is still something familiar and not changing, or full of new feelings, new changes you don't quite understand. It reminds me of a line from a song by Dessa, where she says a flat-chested, gap-toothed girl was the best thing she'd been so far. And I understood that feeling, though I am more . . . myself now that at any time except maybe that far back, maybe the two times have more in common than first appears.
The summer sky today is changing while I watch, the sky here often does, the same green land, but the never-routine sky, blue or white, gray or hazy, the elements in constant flux, something to remember, even about things that are a lot harder to see than the sky.
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