Summer Among 'Em

46 degrees on a damp mid-May morning goes to the bones in a way that it wouldn’t in January. The lilacs have held their blooms close, way past their usual April blossoming. When they do tentatively open, they still withhold their sweet scent—that deep purple smell that plunges so many of us into memory. The rosy peonies, too, are still tightly budded, waiting for the party to start. Like me, the flowers are hesitant to commit to spring, to being fully in the open, until a warm sun coaxes them to let go.

The holly tree, on the other hand, let loose its honey call last evening, as I went out to put the chickens in their coop. This morning, standing beneath it, I can hear a hum that signals the bees are back, and I’m grateful for this meshing of timelines—bees and blossoms—once taken for granted, now a matter of held breath. In Eastern Washington, the bees are “cold and cranky,” the Seattle Times reports. Cold damage and lack of pollination could reduce the cherry crop by 35%.

This is the swing time between seasons that have grown less predictable in the Northwest. In a few weeks, we will mark the one-year anniversary of a record-breaking heat that led our family to fill a water trough with water and ice cubes, call it the Little Methow, and put it under a leafy tree, so that we could sit quietly in the still afternoon, legs immersed to the knees. By the time you read this, we could be anywhere from 46 degrees to 106.

Photo by Beverly Faxon

Here is my secret reason for wanting to be somewhere in between—some temperature where we all open our doors and sail out, free and looping as warm bees. After a frozen winter, a chilled spring of gray skies and sudden hailstorms, and two-plus years of the pandemic, I am yearning to be out among ‘em, as a good friend used to say. I am longing to see other lives being lived.

Once, while swimming in a warm ocean, I watched a father take two little ones out into frothing surf over the children’s heads—a girl maybe five or six, a boy of three or four. The children had floaties on, and for a long afternoon, he held onto them both as waves pushed, pulled and surged around them. It looked both nerve-wracking and exhausting.

The next day, I was sitting on the beach when they rattled up, pulling a full wagon through the sand. He set up an umbrella, spread blankets, unloaded a boogie board, then took the girl and boy back into the surf for another round of immersion. Watching, I began to see deliberation rather than chaos—he was getting them used to waves breaking around them, to water in their faces.

The father started working with the little girl on the boogie board, while the boy played in the shallows. He started her in the low surf, positioning her on the board, pointing her to shore, letting go. She had an immediate feel for moving her body to extend her glide, to turn and ride. Again and again, she stood up in ankle-deep water, grabbed the boogie board rope, and splashed back to him to be launched anew. As in the waves the day before, her father stayed constant and patient. Once she flipped the board, and he was there in an instant, getting her on her feet, bending to check on her. And then, right back onto the board and into the water she went. She ventured further out, into the wilder, deeper waves, with no apparent fear.

Eventually, it was the tiny boy’s turn. When a wave tumbled him, his dad was by his side, righting, reassuring, finally picking him up to hug him and pat his back. There was a sense of deep safety in all this, of a design that went farther than the day’s entertainment.

Eventually, they all returned to the umbrella. The dad put on a hat, he had a sip of water, but he never looked at a phone or asked the kids to give him a break. As if choreographed, he and the little girl ran down to the water, and she lay down and he rinsed her all over. Then, to her delight, he picked her up in a sort of firemen’s carry over his shoulder and ran up the beach with her to keep sand from getting on her wet feet. He put her in the wagon, rubbed her down with a towel and spent long minutes reapplying sunscreen. Then he repeated it all with the boy. Nobody was irritable or tearful about the interlude out of the water, the necessity of bathing, of putting on more sunscreen.

Watching from behind my sunglasses, close enough to observe, but far enough away not to be creepy, I saw the parental tightrope being walked between comfort and risk. I saw how it led to joy. Undistracted, he was fully present. And in my own way, so was I, thinking “Ahh. That is one way to be in the world.”

Later that afternoon, still on the beach, another, even younger boy ran up to me, smiling, his hand outstretched. I reached my hand out to his, and he dropped a tiny car into it.

“And now,” said his father, “you have a car.”

“I guess I do,” I said, looking down at the red car, an unexpected gift so suddenly in my palm.

Moments later the boy came back, again reaching out. I dropped the car back into his hand. He waved and ran off.

The give and the take.

Now I think of those beach-glowed moments—a story unfolding, a car changing hands—and I anticipate one of the joys of summer, especially in a world still often circumscribed by Covid. In the Northwest, we spend our long chill and rainy months largely inside. In the before times, we took winter refuge in steamy-windowed cafes, in theaters, in the homes of friends, bodies crowded at tables and on couches. But the last two years have been different for many.

Our opportunities to find ourselves alive in the world through our interactions with others—close friends, casual friends, strangers—have diminished. We have had fewer chances to see our own lives reflected in the eyes of others, and fewer chances to be a kind witness to the lives of those we meet.

Many of us have honed our observational skills these last two years. We’ve been watching our gardens, our furred friends, the green world of humming insects and the fresh tips of emerging peas. And now summer! — a chance to turn with wide eyes toward the light—the sunlight, the light of those we love, the light of those we’ve never met but might walk among, outside, in the warmth.