S is for Summer, Snow, Smoke

7/29-2023

The last three suggested S words are Summer, Snow, Smoke. Sounds like the seasons we now have in Wisconsin.

How’s your summer going? I bet it's zipping past and you are as weirded out as I am that we are about two minutes from August. Where did the summer go? I have felt this wistful way every summer since I was old enough to know how much First Grade was going to cramp my style.

I walk around with two seasons in my head. Do you?

One is the project, agenda, and to-do list of the day I’m in. I need to make that phone call I’ve been putting off. We can have the rest of the tuna salad for lunch. We’re taking a grandkid to Cave in The Mounds tomorrow; will it be cool enough today to open the windows so I can make banana muffins for him and do I even want to? Oh Lordy, there’s a load of laundry in the dryer. Of course, there is. Nice day for a walk if my sunburn from yesterday doesn’t slow me down. Possibilities and obligations churn through my head like a water wheel running an old-time mill.

Summer is all the images we automatically see because those images have been hawked at us all our lives. Lakes, beaches, picnics, watermelon, bike rides on country lanes. You know.

But then our lives are real and summer is also the eye-popping electric bill, and weather sirens blaring at 10PM (last night) because hail and gale force winds are near. (No damage here.) Summer is driving kids to a beach and then sitting there with a friend having 79% fun and joy while 21% of your soul wants to be at home reading an adventure novel on the sofa.

We love the idea of seasons. We love thinking about awesome times with family and friends at that Up North cottage because the memory isn’t tinged with vacuuming sand and laundering towels and rolling up the kids’ sleeping bags and finding someone else’s overcooked underwear in a corner.

We love snow in our hearts because it’s snowmen, hikes in a silent forest, cardinals at the birdfeeder, big happy (irony intended) family dinners. Not, well, all that other stuff snow is. I promise, I won’t list it. You know.

We don’t even mind smoke because it's what we get with evening campfires and s’mores. Or that lovely pungent sweatshirt we wore when raking leaves weeks ago. Smoke is ribs and smoked gouda on crackers and the Platters singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Not the smoke from from climate disaster forest fires. 

So how’s your summer? Are you having summer or are you reveling in memories of other summers? Sometimes we don’t even know where we live. In our skin? In our memories? In those novels on the sofa?

Out my window right now a huge Black Sailor (you call them turkey buzzards) is high in the sky, elegantly soaring on leftover winds from last night’s storms. I wonder what it’s like to learn from experiences, as wild creatures do, but to never really live anywhere but in the season one is in.

If you make a summer memory today, let us know in the comments so we can share it for a moment.

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I took these cloud photos last night a couple hours before the storms arrived.

And the one that looks like a dog.