Midsummer moodiness
Posted on | July 11, 2007 |
Somehow, the summer is slipping by. Without warning it is more than half over really, and I’m feeling moody about it. The sky has been a mosaic of torn clouds this week. Strong winds and rain have been thrashing about wildly like a greenbroke horse. The night sky burnished with sheet lightening, thunder always rolling low in the distance. It’s that time in the summer when I start to think about it ending, and I feel a certain abject sorrow thinking of it.
Like driving again after living through a car crash, the prospect of going back to work and living through another winter makes me white-knuckled and anxious, albeit in a hazy popsicle and sun-stupored way. Last year’s autumn and winter left scar tissue running the length of our relationship: mine and DH’s. We survived, but sometimes the ache of it painted entire weeks with indigo and gunmetal gray. We came out of it, one bowl at a time at the pottery studio, centering, finding each other among strangers, with slip on our hands and glaze splattering our shirts. But it took until after my birthday to feel like we’d make it to the next.
Now roses are blooming hot red and hooker pink, their petals promiscuously soft, but the slugs are eating holes in the leaves. We still haven’t put in a garden fence, and the ground where the beds have not been turned has begun to reclaim its meadow-ness, grasses and tiny fingered ferns and sturdy-rooted dandelions sprouting up through the rubble of tilled soil. I wake up and spend my days sprawled out reading novels which is something I almost never do, and cannot quite get accustomed to. Hours in a book, interrupted every fifteen minutes by Bean who lopes about the yard with his bubble mower or a watering can.
We got him a set of trains and a an oval loop of track and they keep him occupied for nice long stretches of time, during which I get hauled into whatever place is inked out on the pages I’m turning. I get pulled in so easily, my whole day takes on the hue of the story, as though my life were a cotton cloth saturated in the dye of each story’s language and emotion; little ripples and circles left clean, like tie-dye, where necessity forces me to resurface.
Small things bring me back to the moment. Making alphabet soup. Lying in bed with DH, my head pressed into the soft place where his arm and shoulder meet and his heartbeat thrums so loudly in my head, all at once I start to think it is my own. Or sitting on the planks of the small dock at the neighbor’s pond with Bean, our toes in the water, listening for frogs and splashing, while above us swallows swoop and dive. But in between these things, words are running a haphazard narrative inside my head. Stories are bunkering up against each other.
Last week I finished Pam Houston’s novel Sight Hound, which I wasn’t entirely drawn into at first (many narrators, one of whom is a dog) but found myself sobbing by the end, grateful for it’s right-there in plain sight way of talking about risk and faith and grief. Today I finished As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. DH’s ninth grade copy with his ball point pen notes in the margins.
I read it in two days, though I didn’t expect it to. There was a certain terrifying tension to it. Faulkner’s language is so heady and convoluted and looping that the act of reading it becomes part of the story. You become torn, and belligerent and hateful and grieving because the language makes you feel these things. Like a rip tide, it tows you under. One sentence looping back on itself again and again until you can no longer read it and have it mean anything at all, or another so abrupt, so sharp with colloquial timbre that you have to catch your breath. I want to go back and read the whole thing again, because I felt myself pushed to the very edges of comprehension, as though it were my gut and not my mind to towards which the story was aimed.
I’m also reading Homeland, a collection of short stories by Barbara Kingsolver. My everywhere read. The one I snatch at in all those in-between moments. Each story yanks me into the very center of it’s truth. I read them hungrily, picking over the skeleton of the story, trying to understand how it is made. The gathering of small details, the weight of lines, or the way the author’s voice rides up high over the words of the narrator like radio stations overlapping.
Yet with all the book reading and the lolling about, I haven’t been able to stay focused on writing. There is something in my aquarian nature that is both sanguine and ambivalent. This, combined with Bean’s intermitent pestering, and it seems it is nearly impossible for me to effectively structure my days. I get disoriented in summer, with all the basking and book reading and love making and such, the heat rising up early and abating only after the thunder and rain have rinsed the grass and sky.
Anyone else feel like this, midsummer? What are you reading? Doing?
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16 Responses to “Midsummer moodiness”
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July 11th, 2007 @ 10:50 pm
I’m reading 1,000 Splendid Suns…I am not far enough into it yet to form a complete opinion, but I like it so far,it’s just so discouraging, sad really. Doing? Taking a summer literacy institute at a local university…Katie Wood Ray…Michael Ford…Linda Hoydt’s “person”…Kathryn Mitchell-Pierce…Lester Laminick…it’s a vacation for me because I am not in the classroom right now, I am a mom right now. Funny how I can still spend money on books–almost as well as when I was teaching!
July 12th, 2007 @ 1:38 am
Oh I so know what you mean about summer slipping endlessly away. Each day after watching my two children play, I feel myself wanting to grasp at the shards of sunset that signal the end of yet another, relativly carefree day. They loop into themselves, one and another and another until it’s the middle of July and I find my mind peeking back to the thought of a month of summer vacation left and the fact that school supplies now line the shelves of our local Wal-Mart like unwelcome (for now) intrusions in what has been, I believe, the best summer of my life. As for doing, I taught a short course at our local juco on photography and photo editing. Ended last week and will provide some fun money to take my kids on a couple of day trips. As for reading, can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns. BTW, your blog is very inspiring to me. Think I might delurk more often.
July 12th, 2007 @ 2:20 am
I was actually feeling a lot like this around the solstice, now I’m just waterlogged and resigned to fall since it’s been RAINING NONSTOP FOR WEEKS. argh. Stupid weather. Yesterday I was sure swim school for the kids would be cancelled: it was 12C/52F and pouring cats and dogs. No. They were all there, in the pool. Karin’s lips were blue when she got home and it took her an hour and half to warm her feet up. Viking blood, my ass. I’m reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I can’t decide if I love it or not, but I’m sure having a hard time putting it down.
July 12th, 2007 @ 6:03 am
you write so beautifully
i started, and then abandoned, A Prayer for Owen Meany… i think i’ll pick it back up in the fall. it seems more like a cold-weather book than a warm-weather book.
so when i’ve got the time i read another bit of Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You. she provides entertainment and food for thought in a fresh way, “This Person” is by far my favorite of the short stories.
July 12th, 2007 @ 7:48 am
I feel that way every Sunday, at the prospect of going back to work the next day. I get quite crabby on Sundays, and then get mad at myself for being crabby when I should just be enjoying my last day of leisure for the week.
With the work of the farm, and the girls’ softball games, there’s no time for reading in the summer. (Unless you count garden books and books about canning and freezing vegetables.) January thru March is our slow time and I get more reading done then. I’ve got a whole list made already of books I want to tackle then, and now you’ve got me adding to it.
July 12th, 2007 @ 8:38 am
I am longing for the summer you feel slipping by .. it has been raining here in Germany for weeks, little bits of blue sky popping out for one day, maybe two, a ray of sun has to last for a week. This is no summer yet. I’m still at university, the last days before summer break, without it even being in sight … a weekend of summer is announced, but somehow it doesn’t feel like it will last, last up to the point when I feel moody about it being halfway through, feeling the sunlight running through my fingers and thinking of the end.
I’m still waiting for this summer …
July 12th, 2007 @ 9:56 am
I feel this loll all summer! My name is Summer but it is a dreaded season for me. For as long as I can remember I have loathed the summer months. Maybe it is the heat, I’m unsure. All I know is that I long for crisp walks and warm sweaters. I would almost always prefer to sit and read in front of a fire but right now I sit on my tiny balcony in the ghetto of this city and linger over Pride and Prejudice for the 100th time, it brings comfort to reread the familiar. I’m also reading the collected works of W.B. Yeats and C.S. Lewis’s All My Road Before Me. I want to read more novels or something a bit more contemporary but I’m so restless I seem to have little patience for these uncharted waters. I do love Barbara Kingsolver so maybe I will pick up her short stories and start small. I quite enjoy your writing, thanks for sharing what you are reading.
July 12th, 2007 @ 11:06 am
My agreement with you is fully centered on the fact that I am a teacher and this seems like it should be my break. But foolishly I thought to fill up my days with 2 Master’s classes and have been reading nothing but assigned works. In some ways this can be great: exposure to things I never would have picked up, novels by faraway authors whom I did not know existed, fascinating discussions about the effects of imperialism and globalization. But it is also exhausting. Fifteen books are waiting in a pile next to my bed, begging me to please read them- and I can’t, I just don’t have time.
But in the spirit of trying to be more balanced and less whiny, I must also say that I am taking a Jane Austen course for fun with a professor I love and the pages of Mansfield park keep luring me further in. Furthermore (and here comes a big confession), Harry Potter arrives on my doorstep in just about one week and I could not be more excited.
July 12th, 2007 @ 12:23 pm
Christina,
The dread is good — I’ve made my way through many winters by letting fear build and build in autumn. Then I’m calmed by how easily winter passes, how quickly spring comes (more quickly in California, I know). If you let the summer sink deep, if you let yourself grow tan and sluggish and whimsical and hotheaded, it’s enough to carry you through. Be so lazy that, come fall, you look for rain, happily direct each moment into it’s designated slot: now family, now art, now work.
July 12th, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
My husband is facing the same dread that you are. He is a professor at the local university and is using his summer to try and get some things published before his tenure review. All types of things, from our own personal trauma to the escape of installing crown molding, have been allowing him to procrastinate. And soon syllabi will need to be made and text books ordered. I love the end of summer because it means the end of 99 degree heat.
I am currently reading The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver - love her. Have you ever read Faulkner’s Light in August? Great symbolism.
July 12th, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
To be honest I don’t remember it’s summer until the weekend comes. I wake up and go to work, then come back home and get ready for yet another day of the same ritual. It’s only on weekends that husband and I get a glimpse of summertime fun, so we enjoy every minute we can (despite the 100-degree Florida weather).
My 3 weeks of vacation per year are normally broken down into one-week getaways over a 12-month span to help my sanity. I soooo WISH I could take the whole summer off… like back when I was a kid… going to my grandparents’ house… the best years of my life.
July 13th, 2007 @ 12:29 pm
From now on, I’ll be reading your blog. Beautiful!
Where did summer run off to so quickly?
July 16th, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
Hello, thanks for sharing. I am a teacher also and I’ve noticed a certain similarity to the feelings you’ve described. I think the summer affords me the time to reflect and that sometimes leads to malaise or lethargy bordering on mild depression. The shift in structure leaves a void that while welcomed, seems to take time to adjust to. I’m newly married and I think this scared my husband because it’s a side he hadn’t seen before. Again, thanks for your writing. All the best to you.
July 16th, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Yes, suddenly, it’s halfway and I haven’t even taken much advantage of sleeping in, of getting projects done, of cleaning the house. It’s midsummer and they are putting school things out already, which makes me so sad (and so happy, so ready for that routine again).
July 17th, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Your description of moodiness really struck a chord with me. I teach middle school and summer is always holds some bittersweet moments for me. I think it’s the unstructured schedule. It allows time to think, to ponder, and sometimes to regret. Thanks for sharing.
July 21st, 2007 @ 8:25 am
Just like Gabs, I don’t remember it’s summer until the weekend and sometimes not even then because I’m trying to get everything done, inside and out because it’s summer, I still forget. I’m heading to Oregon in a week for vacation and that’s when I’ll enjoy my summer. I too long for those lazy days of summer when I was in school. I was a stay at home for 9 years and those were good times too.
I’m taking a Theater 100 course online this summer so I’m enjoying that text but I am also reading novels at night in bed. Just finished Elizabeth Bergs dream when your feeling blue and am now reading Anita Shreve’s Body Surfing. The next book will be the beginning of the Harry Potter books because I want to read those this fall and winter. You are a fantastic writer and artist by the way.