We Let Summer Come to Us

In need of a break from mowing, I lower myself into one of those plastic Adirondack-style chairs—this one’s lime green—to rest in the shade of a mutant Meyer’s lemon tree.

The sounds of summer arrived on the breeze. The street’s a little quieter as gasoline mowers yield, slowly, to electric. There are still the bursts of jet engine noise from blowers as their operators blast cut grass—and dust—into the street and storm drains.

Unlike fall, which we step into lively and eager to embrace the cool air, summer days we approach as we would a dog we’re not sure is friendly. We let summer come to us.

Children are back on the street. Once, there were twenty-one children on our street, from teenagers to babes in arms. The herd of children would break off into ones and twos to run from house to house, pausing to knock before pushing open unlocked doors. 

There were fewer fences. Children ran parallel to the street across lush grass that cushioned falls. I quit using pesticides the first time I saw a child stop at my garden, help himself to a cherry tomato, and rush on. 

"Unlike fall, which we step into lively and eager to embrace the cool air, summer days we approach as we would a dog we’re not sure is friendly. We let summer come to us." —Ed Cullen

A boy who lives a few doors up the street escapes the gravity of his driveway in a battery-powered car from time to time. I see him headed my way and think of Stuart Little, E.B. White’s adventurous mouse. 

“I need help,” the boy announced the other day. His car’s battery needed charging. The car was moving so slowly it was being passed by crawling bugs. I pushed my neighbor up the street and left him in his driveway as his mother advanced. Escape thwarted. 

Though I grew up in the days before air conditioning—endured the oppressive, wet heat of offshore Vietnam and work outside every day—as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to make my peace with summer.

[Read Ed Cullen's ode to local bird watchers here.]

I ignore television weather persons who delight in forecasting “another day of heat and high humidity” to viewers who walk from air-conditioned houses to air-conditioned cars to drive to air-conditioned offices. In the COVID time, weather forecasters were telling people who no longer went outside that if they did it would be summer.

When weather people issue hot air cautions after May 1, I am not surprised. I don’t panic. I know there’s the chance that early mornings will be soft with small breezes, a good time to meditate while holding one end of a watering wand.

Rather than write off three or four months of the year, I have learned to move slowly, dress for the tropics, drink water through the day and work outside in brief stints. When I come up with a remedy for the true bane of summer—mosquitoes—I’ll let you know.

Our daily lives change slowly, more slowly than the rapid change we see forecast in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. As I write in a room with two desks, the desk to my left harbors the reality of switching from gasoline machines for lawn work to battery-powered. Quietly, with no smell, batteries are charging, their small green, yellow, and red lights reporting their states of readiness.

When I go out to work, I put a couple of batteries in my pants pockets to run the lawn mower, the string trimmer and the blower. I use a grass catcher to feed an insatiable compost pit. I work a small city plot with my mind at an imaginary place on the side of a hill above a pond fringed by woods.

I would live in a solar house and draw water from a well if I could. I content myself with composting, tending a vegetable garden and mowing the grass to a hum instead of a howl. It is enough to make peace with summer and let my mind live off the grid.