This oppressive heat makes us feel prickly and wild.
We are edgy, and our tempers flare.
We try to limit ourselves to cool spaces. Driving in our air conditioned cars rather than walking a few blocks.
Our dogs lie stretched across the hardwood floors all day, trying to absorb the coolness from the night before.
And outside there are empty cicada husks clinging to the underside of my birdbath.
It’s as if they abandoned hope halfway up and then gave up the ghost. Screaming skeletons in the night.
And then today I saw several live ones struggling on the pavement. They were belly up, like they had lost their minds and just given up on the trip.
And at night, the white owls stay silent while the young foxes scream.
To me, Summer often feels like this kind of fevered dream. Something to be gotten through.
It’s just the way it is in the South.
And tonight, I think of my Dad, and this enduring sadness that settles like the humid air.
The grief feels less sharp now, but his presence hovers in the ether.
I remember summers from the 1970s.
The fireflies every night at dusk, no fail.
The cool sidewalks under bare feet while taking a late night walk down to the corner store.
The frigid water in the city swimming pool. Getting goosebumps coming out – wrapping a thick towel around my sunburned shoulders. Snack bar ice cream sandwiches and Sun-In.
Riding to Dairy Queen on the family station wagon’s tailgate, swinging our dusty legs, loving the illicit freedom.
No air conditioning, but shades drawn in the bedroom during the day to keep a bit of cool.
Nighttime was a reprieve from the sun, nature quietly exhaling, and the dusky shadows whisking away the afternoon’s sticky air.
And memories of entire days surrendered to reading in my bedroom when I was twelve. Reading all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries and To Kill A Mockingbird.
I would stay in there all day, marinating, ruminating – in an incubator that lives within me still.
The heat slayed us sisters but we had the sense to give in. We knew to stop racing around and to just lie on our beds slurping popsicles and playing endless rounds of Rack-O.
But the days were too long – there was just too much time to think about things.
Wondering about my old friends left behind. Fretting about moving to a new town, with a new school – and who would be my new best friend?
My dad is such a star in this slideshow:
The summer of 1974 vacationing at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. We had the entire three months to swim and bake on the beach before we moved to the city.
He was so relaxed and fun.
He would go into town and buy dozens of blue crabs to crack open and pick apart – served with corn on the cob dripping with butter. All of us around that splintery picnic table on the wide front porch.
And wading out into the Pamlico sound, digging with our feet down into the mucky sand, extracting the prized clams.
Later, Mom steaming them for dinner, served up with homemade cocktail sauce.
Dad was busy during the day writing his book in the upstairs attic, and man it was hot up there. I think Mom wanted him out from under foot during the day, and so she sequestered him.
And as I write, I think of him there, writing.
Sweating in that heat, in a fervor of creativity.
That summer sandbagged us, and held us pinned in stasis until the fall when school would start up.
By then, my sisters would quit playing with Barbies. And I had learned how to use a pink electric razor.
Like the cicadas, we were ready for new bodies.
And hopefully, when school started, our summer wildness would tamp down and we’d be civilized enough to sit indoors at a desk all day.
No doubt, that last summer was the end of our childhoods, but those younger selves remained baked into us forever.
Today I catch these moments and hold them like an insect in golden amber.
Because Dad is still here.
And if I go upstairs and close the blinds and lie down, I can recall so much more.
Past summers of joy, and all of the times he wanted us to have fun – waffle cones on the boardwalk, trips to the local bookstore, ghost stories in a thunderstorm.
And now this summer of sadness.
I can bear it because I have these memories. They are like a cool washcloth laid across the forehead.
They sooth me as I lie in bed, fighting sleep, scratching at chigger bites under the covers.
But still, like the old adolescent me, I fret about so many things.
And then, late into the night, I let the cooler air slowly settle around me, and I think about those summers.
So much of the world I didn’t understand back then, and that I don’t understand even now, after all these years.
But the one thing that remains constant is change.
Aging bodies, the years moving on – summer to summer.
The world spins, the planet burns, and here I am, remembering my dad and letting that be enough.
I have changed so much, all of us have, and yet we are also the same.
And I think: can these things that are temporal also be eternal?
