It’s summer now here, not brutally hot but humid even in the mornings. This is my tenth summer in Georgia, and it is my least favorite time of the year. When you grow up in a northern climate, especially one on a Great Lake that acts as a natural air-conditioner, you revere summer. The sky is bright and blue but never too intense. You can smell freshwater on a breeze. Your entire spine unkinks, it seems. When we were little, we spent those days out on the river or lake on my father’s boat, and we would take a ride after dinner down to the shore and get frozen custard. You could spend the entire day outside on a deck, under a red maple tree, reading a book. It was Buffalo’s gift to you, those summers. It was what kept you there, or coming back.
The summer here reminds me not of possibility, but of loss. I’m pretty acclimated, in that I still walk every day at four pm, sweating through my sports bra. I like being outdoors too much to acquiesce, or maybe I’m just fucking stubborn. But I love the sun, and walking is good for my brain, so I slather on the SPF and the No Natz! spray that is mostly just rosemary essential oil but works pretty well, and I try to get in two or three miles. And I feel something like stubborn pride on my walks, when the air is perfectly still and everyone who drives by is cocooned in their vehicles with the air-conditioning blasting, like, Yeah, I’m out here. And I’m not even from here, y’all! I can hang.
This May, as the calendar creeps toward June but nothing else marks time, the onset of summer has hit me hard. I have no escape hatch, no flights with airport codes of MQT or MSP. I have a garden that I need to rip apart, a task that exhausts me just to think of it. The summer shouldn’t feel all that different from ones past, which as an academic I tend to spend at home writing or reading, but of course the difference, as my husband put it, is the difference between a closed door and a locked one. It was one thing in February to turn down a residency in Iceland, ready to spend time at home. It is another to have the world cancel on you.
I am writing this in our enclosed sunroom, which might be the best thing of many good things the previous owners, who designed this house, built. It is open to our kitchen and living room via two sets of doors, and three of the four walls are sliding glass doors. We spend hours out here, less so in the summer when it feels slightly wasteful. I spent last spring and this one planting around the patio: rosemary, which winters well, a million varieties of lantana, purple spiderwort and lavender. There are birdfeeders, now, because I have turned into a person who delights at watching the hummingbirds and cardinals and titmouses. In the corner of the yard is a huge French hydrangea, bright blue in this soil. I learned in my first summer here to resist the call to cut them for the house. The blooms will die within the week inside, but last for weeks outside, even as the sun grinds down.
The cruelty of a Georgia summer hits different than a Buffalo winter, and so I accept it. Things are green and damp here. The sun shines most days, even when I wish it wouldn’t. Everything is a compromise, of course, and this one is pretty luxurious. The thing about a blank calendar or a hot day is their oppressiveness openness, their sheer possibility. You can clip the gardenia and bring it inside, put it next to the sink as a reminder that right outside your garage door, something blooms.
