It was the summer of insects, cicadas and their aftermath, the oak leaf itch mites. It was the summer of Wednesday adventures with my grandsons, downhill-cycling, woodsy-hiking, maze-navigating, mini-golfing, water-sliding, dolphin-watching, art-appreciating, ice cream-slurping, bumper-bowling, sand-castling, animal-carouseling, Bean-mirroring, Grant Park-orchestrating, dinosaur-hunting, fireworks-gazing, and one unforgettable ride on the Metra. Trips to the zoo and the arboretum and the Art Institute, and Millennium Park and Lighthouse Beach and Bahai Temple and dreaming of college on a campus like Northwestern.
Early-morning meditations in Mills Park, Shakespeare al fresco in Austin Gardens, surviving the night of 10 tornadoes and weather neither oppressive nor dangerous but occasionally ideal, late-evening back-deck birthday celebrations, lunches with friends at Hemmingway’s, browsing the Hyde Park Art Show, long walks, films in the cool dark of movie theaters, the ripeness of Farmers Market, bidding adieu to the last of my parents’ generation with a cousins’ luncheon outside of Il Vicolo.
Much to savor and store up for the soon-returning, coat-wearing chill that consumes two-thirds of the year, global warming notwithstanding. Technically, autumn has arrived, post-equinox, with the cold creeping toward us under the cloak of lengthening night.
To hold off its return a while longer, I take refuge in my notebook and find enough notes for an impressionistic summer summary:
Our last Wednesday before school starts: Playing in the sand at Lighthouse Beach, Bryce and Tyler imbedded in their surroundings — wave, wind, sand, seagulls and, of course, abundant sunshine. Their true selves emerge — not in isolation but within the surrounding All. Entirely, seamlessly, organically, holistically — what all of us are, though we forget. They build a sandwall or fortress or embankment. It is evolving, with input from the dissolving waves. It’s not the end result that matters. Not the noun but the gerund. Building more than “the building.” Abstract architectural form … or maybe a beached whale … with a moat.
Surrounded by sound, our edges melt into everything else. Uninterrupted sunlight splashes the greenscape like an impressionist painting. Or, more accurately, paintings splash objects with light based on this sunlit beach. A steady breeze feels like some sea deity blessing the attacking waves, the invaders immediately tamed by their intersection with the shore. The ceaseless sonic bath overwhelms internal chatter, rinses away neurotic thinking, mesmerizes the mind.
Wind plays the trees, the world’s oldest musical instrument, swaying boughs the world’s oldest dance. Songs sift through the leaves, dressing the invisible. Clouds play the world’s oldest game of peekaboo, shapeshifting moods — dark to bright, catch and release, promise to fulfillment, stillness to restlessness.
Amazing what you can see and hear when you inhabit the world, when what you love preempts what you forgot to do yesterday and need to do today. …
A mid-September, Midwestern late evening: Awash in light, beneath the haloed moon, surrounded by trees and crickets, festival revelers stumble home in contented conversation past construction horses blinking by newly rebuilt curbs. Things as they are, asking nothing more. Walkers feel their way home through the shadowy tableaux under leafy awnings, sensing the pavement ahead, like a writer waiting for sentences to surface in the midnight dark — or questions, the mind’s flashlight; or dreams, shining with their own reflective surfaces; or stars, hidden behind the urban glowscape.
All is as is — perfect, not how it ought to be, paying no heed to imperfections, just momentary perfection, when the way it is matches the way it must be, not life living up to our expectations and requirements, but life as it is, re-entering the beautiful world that waits just outside our thoughts with the ripe readiness of a farmers market, eager to be plucked. …
Driving home a week later at dusk: A Harvest Supermoon perches like a giant peach above the horizon, silent, unobstructed, as if it had patiently waited eons for this moment to command my attention above the car hoods in the endless succession before me. This close encounter of the fourth kind, or maybe the fifth, rises like yeast in the east to its creamy apex, a MilkMoon, spilling its light over everything and everyone. Nothing to cry over. …
At the tail end of a long, noisy but too-short summer, with its many ups and downs (I have had it with cicadas) and a topsy-turvy, upside-down election campaign, we were gifted, out of nowhere, with 12 consecutive days of bright sun, cool mornings leading to 80-degree but not-too-humid warmth — stable, consistent, welcome, like a payoff for our patience. As if to say, “All is forgiven.”
A dozen days bouquet, a string of pearls, a gift from God knows where.
As if summer were bidding us its fondest farewell.