Microseasons: Summer
I live in Michigan now, for now, and to make the most of our experience, we’re living as the locals do: by the season. Clarissa Pinkola Estes cites her version of micro seasons in Women Who Run With the Wolves: “When I was a child in the north woods, before I learned there were four seasons to a year, I thought there were dozens: the time of night-time thunderstorms, heat lightning time, bonfires-in-the-woods time, blood-on-the-snow time, the times of ice trees, bowing trees, crying trees, shimmering trees, breaded trees, waving-at-the-tops-only tress, and trees-drop-their-babies time. I loved the seasons of diamond snow, steaming snow, squeaking snow, and even dirty snow and stone snow, for these meant the time of flower blossoms on the river was coming.
These seasons were like important and holy visitors and each sent its harbingers: pine cones open, pine cones closed, the smell of leaf rot, the smell of rain coming, crackling hair, lank hair, bushy hair, doors loose, doors tight, doors that won’t shut at all, windowpanes covered with ice-hair, windowpanes covered with wet petals, windowpanes covered with yellow pollen, windowpanes pecked with sap gum. And our own skin had its cycles too: parched, sweaty, gritty, sunburned, soft.”
This last calendar season was replete with black eyed susans growing wild near the driveway season, coneflowers growing like wildfire in the ditches season, queen anne’s lace adorning the roadside season, and daisies burnt up too quick in the sun season. It was parched grass peppered with chickory, fireflies dotting the night like stars, toes in clear sun-sparkled water off the dock on the lake, sparklers and smell of sulfur while the mosquitos nibbled our toes season. It was flower crowns of clover and grounding toes in sand wherever possible. It was rambling roses climbing up the walls season and hiding in the shade of dappled light trees season. It was kids on shoulders picking mulberries from high branches and eating more blueberries than we put in the buckets and cold dips in lakes that look like oceans.
Roadside corn stands and fields exploding with sunflowers while the evening orange sunny haze hangs low over them. It was double rainbows stamped vividly against gray skies after a thunderstorm season, basketfuls of flowers collected and brought inside, monarchs in the purple bush, early morning light, and road trips to dunes. It was trail walking in the heart of forests, concerts, fireworks, and earth under my fingernails. The smell of wood fire, a charcoal grill, the sound of cicadas (that I always thought was the sound heat makes when I was young, like the way heat waves look on the sunny pavement).
When I think back on my life, it’s sometimes hard to remember. The seasons blur. I can’t tell you what summer 2017 was like, and that scares me. I don’t want to forget. This log is an effort to commit the details to memory, to recall through my senses what it felt like to be alive here, now.
