It was a late start to summer this year, but once it arrived for me, I gripped and then chased it like it was the last summer I would ever live through.
I slouched into the season at first, leaving Montana, and my job, in the second week of June for two weeks in California. I was tired and still preoccupied with work at the newspaper I had just left behind when I arrived at LAX at midnight on a Monday, my fingernails bitten down to the skin. I had wanted to be filled with a sense of release as the plane descended over the city lights that night – the precise opposite of the landscape I had just taken flight from – but no dice. My mind was stuck in that dense, dark puddle of navel-gazing that I back myself into when I’m worn down. Getting up and out of it is just wheels spinning in mud until traction is found.
A few days after I got back to my hometown – with days of late sleep-ins, long mornings of coffee on the back porch, nights in my parents’ hot tub under walnut trees in the backyard – I was house sitting for friends who live on top of a hill that looks out to one of my favorite mountain ranges. Doing breaststrokes in their pool is like swimming towards Figueroa Mountain; in the morning when I walk down to feed the horses and collect The Wall Street Journal at the bottom of the long, winding dirt driveway, a cup of coffee in my hand, the morning on my eyelids as I pass under the shadow of oak trees, every fourth step is a prayer (Thank you. Thank you. Thank you). I have looked after this house and its occupants – kids, now grown; beloved spaniels, now passed away; horses, forever on guard in the front corral; rose gardens, miraculously still here in the blistering Augusts – during summer and winter vacations, down times between jobs, and long weekends since I was 15. I am 39 now. This house on the hill has always been a place of rest. I dreamed of that long walk down the driveway when I was working late nights on the third floor of a grey building at a city newspaper in New Zealand, during the long, dark winters when the coastal winds ripped the car door handles from my fingers as I’d be loading groceries. Now the house is, for the most part, in my time zone when I arrive from Montana, but the sense of distance from my own life is still there every time I arrive.
I always underestimate the power of that distance – as well as sleep, sun, and a portal into a fictional world – to give me just that little bit of grip that I need to pull myself together. I took this photo towards the end of my second day, feeling like I was drunk with the time I had on my hands, but also, I realized, just plain drunk. The friends had left an opened bottle of Champagne in the fridge for me. It was a Tuesday – normally my hell day at the paper as we prepped it to go to print the next morning, with last-minute decisions and judgement calls to make; errors to search for when your brain was already shaved off into a hundred paper thin cheese slices to care for all the details that begged for your time, followed by board meetings that night. The day before I had cycled down to the Book Loft in Solvang to find a novel I had been thinking about, and the fact that I had all this time to make such a leisurely decision about how I was going to spend my leisure time seemed so reckless. I swam and read, swam and read; ate peaches with Greek yogurt; then read some more. I decided to have a small glass of Champagne after napping in the sun. I read and sipped and watched the sun change. It seemed like a fine idea to have another glass to celebrate hitting the halfway mark on the book by 3 pm.
As I stood a little while later, setting the book down in the pool chair to have one final dip in the pool, a cautious voice in my head asked: Have we had too much Champagne to go swimming?
I sat back down on the pool chair, put another layer of sunscreen on, and then my shades, and lay there, grinning. Have I had too much Champagne to go swimming. What a glorious day, that this was the only significant question I had to ask myself.
It was Tuesday, and it was the beginning of my summer. I think I’m writing about it to remind myself how good that day was.
Today is Thursday in October and I woke up in Montana as the sun was just coming up over the ranch land outside the living room window as the heater crackles to life. Two mornings ago, I parted the curtains to snow falling. Since that Tuesday in June, I’ve swam in rivers, lakes, and two oceans, mowed my weed-laden lawn three times, returned for one last stint as editor before turning over the job to a young, bright journalism graduate. I’ve become deft at swiftly changing white linen tablecloths so the table never shows, delivered margaritas by jeep to guests as they pan for sapphires, cycled like mad across an island for my first Atlantic lobster, and sat at a desk in a white room with white-washed floors in an old whaling town for two weeks and wrote until the made-up world I had whipped into existence – marching it along each morning that summer before my 6:30 a.m. breakfast shift started – finally awakened and began to shakily walk along towards an ending all on its own.
It has been the longest of summers. Sometimes you have to grip that season of great freedom and happiness while you have it, give it one last tight squeeze, then release it to make room for the good things to come. I’m ready.
(Also: Put Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter on your reading list, by a pool, by a fire, on a plane, on a train, wherever. It took him something like 15 years to write the novel and it was one of my favorite reads in the last five years. I finished it in a bar on Flathead Lake, crying, the night I came back to Montana.)
