late summer
In early summer, I buy Ali Smith’s final heady novel in the seasonal quartet: Summer. Ali Smith has taken us from Autumn to Summer, from Brexit to pandemic. Whenever I’m in London, I stop at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. In another life, I would have been a student behind the British Museum at SOAS; instead, I stayed in Washington, DC. If I had decided to study at SOAS, I never would have studied in Fitzrovia’s coffee shops; never would I have crossed Russel Square to get to class. I would have been in a small Camden apartment - a flat - on Zoom. A reminder not to get lost in the details; our world is not stagnant - not a suburbia.
“And summer's surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We're always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset.”
Late Summer, not in London, but Tennessee. Memories of the Pandemic have been in Tennessee. We arrived in Tennessee in May 2020 - which in my timeline was, what we believed at the time, the second phase of the Pandemic. We’d been at home for two months. Soon, stay-at-home orders would expire; phases of reopening would appear. phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, and then phases disappeared. We returned for Mid-winter, to Tennessee, and now it’s late summer.
Memorial Day and Labor Day bookend summer in the United States. 14-weeks of endless summer and opportunities and dreams.
“The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.”
In August, in DC, I’m ready for fall - for September and October. August, the Sunday of summer. On September 1st, as we prepare to leave for Tennesse, Hurricane Ida continues its - her - swoop and curve throughout the lower 48, from New Orleans to New York. As her path passes near DC, a month of heavy, humid air is broken as the tropical storm flushes the air and the rivers. August, so heavy in DC. In Tennessee, the air is lighter; it cools at night, and I grab an extra layer - an oversized thrifted denim shirt - to sit around the fire. I sip whiskey and gaze up at the dark sky blanketed with stars.
“And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer's day wasn't long enough.”
I spend the summer reading Summer. All summer. From June to September. Graduate school readings and a return to campus - a second pandemic fall, after a second pandemic spring and summer - take my attention from finishing the novel.
“I agree there is more summer to come.” - Ali Smith
Septemeber, and the arrival of fall, brings new energy as summer fatigue - Natsuabate - dissipates.
