I’m Not Going to Miss This Summer
Am I?
I’m tempted to say: Dear Summer, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
This, though, I realize is not entirely fair.
How can I explain my summer (for we have a few days of it left)?1 It was something like this picture I took of my freezer.
I caught it in the evening light a few weeks ago—a light that’s coming quicker now. The freezer was/is a hodgepodge of preservation attempts, none of it overly aesthetically pleasing. I used plastic ziplock bags, for one. The days of using only glass and silicone freezer bags will come some day but not just yet. I don’t have any kind of tally of what I’ve stocked up. It’s something like: twenty five-ish pounds of cherries, some strawberries, some pesto bricks, two bags of jalapeños stuffed with camembert2, a lonesome bag of peaches, a handful of chard, and probably more kale than anything else.
It’s all nothing like the grand plans I made, yet it’s all more than I’ve managed in years past. Will it keep us through the winter? Maybe. The kale might. The pesto? Unlikely, but I don’t know what amount would.
But this is what I have been able to cram into the freezer upstairs. Not pictured is the downstairs, standing freezer, also crammed full but even less glamorous. The plans to acquire a chest freezer have not yet actualized.
What I have squirreled away will nourish us and remind us of warmer months. It’ll reduce our grocery store bills. But it was not what I intended. At once, it feels half-hearted and like all I could manage.
That is how I’m feeling here at the end of my summer. A shrug. A sigh. Longing for the days I breathe easier in the less-humid air of the coming season. A “oh right, yeah, I guess that was nice,” all too easily escapes my lips. All in all, it was too much and too little.
This summer did not contain what I hoped it would. You could say it contained multitudes…just not the ensemble I thought was coming. Has there ever been a summer so well watered by my tears? Perhaps not. And maybe, I can admit now, it was exactly what was needed.
This is the summer I learned that this is the season—at least here in zone 6b—where I must take more care. It’s the season I spend the least amount of time outside, because it’s too humid, too hot, and there is no cool body of water that is safe enough to seek comfort in nearby.3 This gets to me within three days. A week long heat wave makes me feel like a caged animal and my body hurts from the lack of walks. This summer, we got a staggeringly small amount of rain too. This doesn’t make for a good looking landscape or garden, although I have savored watering our gardens at sunset.4
This was also the summer of the first wildfire smoke I’ve ever experienced. Likely not the last. The climate crisis seemed to make its presence known in new and unavoidable ways. The wildfires. Nearly no rain. Heat like I’ve not known. Storms seem to be different too—faster, stronger, and with constant lightening. A tornado touched down twenty minutes from where I grew up—the first in my lifetime I believe.
It makes me see the future differently. It can make me feel a bit trapped and scared already. I have been trying all summer to keep up hope.
Summer can be too much. It needs to be temporary.
And I see this mimicked within my body.
In the inner seasons framework of the menstrual cycle, the time of ovulation is called the inner summer. Just like the stereotypical views of summer we have, the inner summer is “supposed” to be all light, bright, bold, incredible. At ovulation we’re “supposed” to feel sexy and wild and able to do all the things. In the outer summer months of the northern hemisphere—June to September—we’re “supposed” to run around, have parties, go to the beach, get sunburnt, do all the stuff…something like that.
But the inner summer for me is just as difficult as the outer summer. It’s the time when I have the most anxiety, intrusive thoughts and just generally get overwhelmed. Inner summer, with its high estrogen, isn’t guaranteed to make me feel amazing. It may make me feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff.
During this outer summer too I found myself looking over cliffsides. That’s largely what I found myself writing about this summer—hawk-eye views of systemic issues within our society. It just felt too pressing, as I looked around at people hurting (particularly women and marginalized people) and viscerally felt the building climate crisis.
Each week I told myself I wouldn’t writing a big, heavy essay again. Each week I did.5
A Practical Way to Live Cyclically or An Impossible Task?
What if the world went cyclical again?
But this can’t keep up.
The heat.
The heaviness.
The growth and grand views.
I feel a yearning for the next season, and thankfully it’s coming. This morning, I have a thin cotton sweater on and I smell the decomposition beginning.
I feel this itch with the outer season and my inner seasons. Ovulation—while a necessary part of the cycle—holds nothing to inward turn and slowness of post-ovulation or inner autumn. I savor the turn back into the dark release of menstruation. I’ve found peace knowing that each part cannot exist without the others or it wouldn’t be a cycle.
This is the kind of felt knowledge held in a body that experiences menstruation. It’s the kind of experience we need in the face of the climate crisis.
I’ve just started reading Climate Resilience: How We Keep Each Other Sage, Care For Our Communities, and Fight Back Against Climate Change. It’s a collection of essays from thirty-nine women, nonbinary and gender expansive people compiled by Kylie Flanagan. It’s stated very clearly in the introduction that none of the contributors are cisgender men. Flanagan writes:
“White men, along with climate solutions rooted in more masculine ideals such as efficiency, competition, ego, scale and domination, have been centered in the climate conversation for too long. And there so-called solutions haven’t worked. I’m eager to help amplify and usher in an era of climate leadership and solutions that grounded in empathy, embodiment, generosity, interdependence, resourcefulness, gratitude, connection, and ease.”
I was amazed that she stated outright that there would be no voices of men included. And her explanation of why is completely on point. We have tried—not just in the climate crisis but in many areas of life and society—following a way that is guided by masculine experience and perspectives. It’s not working. It’s time to center a different way.
A way that goes like: empathy, embodiment, generosity, interdependence, resourcefulness, gratitude, connection, ease.
The way the earth and the seasons know quite well.
Most of all, what this summer has taught me is you do not have to love every season to be in it. I have never before felt more in a season—present with all the realities of it—than I have with this one. Being present with it, even when my hands were swollen from the heat and there was sweat pouring down my face, ultimately felt more true and gratifying than numbing my way through the season.
And also, I know it’s temporary. I know in my body the life of cycles. Another way is coming.
Alright, fall. See you soon. Summer, thanks for being exactly what you were.
But what do you think?
🌀How do you feel about masculine voices being sidelined for a change, as we move forward?
🌀Do you think the realities of a menstruating body can show us something about the climate crisis and new ways of being?
🌀What did this summer hold for you?
Saturday, September 23 is the first day of fall. I’ll be sending out an email around then with some of my fall feelings and plans.
My husband’s. I want no part of this.
There are bodies of water, here on the stolen homelands of the Susquehanna. But at this point, I would not consider them safe. The ocean, about an hour away, is highly polluted. And so I trust none of the rivers that flow to that ocean. There is a man made lake but underwater currents make it an unsafe place to swim. At any rate, it is so shallow that it’s hardly any cooler than the air some days. What I’m saying is: I need the cold North Atlantic.
I suppose also because you cannot see how parched everything is.
The weeks where outer and inner summer converged—phew, I don’t even want to go back and figure out which those were. I bet they were doozies.