Happy New Year
Looking at August
Not far from home, we drove past a house with dinner-plate-sized hibiscus flowers out front. They were a luminous orange, a fire-weather sunset. I don’t know the name of the varietal, but I felt the covetousness rise up. I wish I had flowers like those. I wish I had proper flowers at all; the nasturtiums are the only ones that seem to thrive under my admittedly absentee gardening approach. In fact, despite my efforts to contain them with the ground cloth that was supposed to hold space for some white petunias, the nasturtiums cannot be stopped.
Well, I suppose they could be thinned or pruned, but they’ve put so much gusto into existing it seems unfair to curtail them. So on they go, along with a volunteer cherry tomato in the corner of that bed. The deer nip the top of that tomato plant off regularly, but that’s okay. We put a fence around the vegetable part of the garden, so the deer can’t get to the tomatoes proper.1
A green thumb is one of those things I’m relatively content filing under “skills wanted, but not enough to really work at them,” like drawing and exciting eyeliner, and I understand that the anemic polka-dot plants languishing in the front bed are doing their best with the resources they’ve been given.
But back to the hibiscus: hibiscus flowers are one of my favorite things. The big ones and the bright ones—goldenrod and magenta and unrelenting scarlet—seem pure color distilled from the places where summer lasts all year. I was a fully grown person by the time I understood that the humble Rose of Sharon bushes that are everywhere here in central Pennsylvania are also hibiscus varietals. At my parents’ house, two of them grow on the wilder edges of the yard: between the archery target and the previous owners’ rubbish pile, where we found broken pottery and whole insulin bottles as kids. Those grew more modest flowers, barely the size of my palm, and the color was too much like the lilacs that grew at the base of the driveway to feel special. After all, Rose of Sharon can’t hold a candle to the scent of lilacs, which are so short-lived and which come at the best side of spring—where summer feels near. That’s really the crux of it: the Rose of Sharon blooms toward the end of summer. In my parents’ yard, a little farther north and which gets more shade than sun, they always seemed to bloom in the second and third week of August, right around the time we were herded into the car for the annual trip to replace the sneakers we’d outgrown and one last little hurrah before school started: Dorney Park or the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. Even now, twenty-odd years after the last time my mom bought me some Converse and a roasted turkey leg on the third weekend of August, I see those blooms and get a little panicky jolt of summer’s end.
The Rose of Sharon at the end of my neighbor’s drive has been in bloom for two weeks or more. Maybe it gets more sun; maybe everything is shifting earlier with the heat; maybe it was always like this and I am not quite remembering correctly. But that little jolt has never gone away.
So much of it has to do with having never left school: since I was five years old, without a single year of difference, August is back-to-school. August is ending and beginning for me, so much more than January 1, and so these are the days time feels most slippery. Late July and early August are the days I am most prone to regret: all the projects left undone, all that hindsight so clear in seeing how easy it is to squander hours when it feels as though they are abundant.
I try (and fail, and fail) not to think like this. If there were naps (and there were, so many), I needed them. If I didn’t write as much as I wanted or read as much as I wanted2, I sure did spend a lot of time trying to amuse a pair of cats that are probably a little bit too smart, and we all needed that. Every year, I think this summer will be different! and I brandish my limb-long project list, and every year, at this time, when the must-dos crowd out the “learn how to sew an Oxford shirt exactly to my own specifications” sort of things, there’s that sinking feeling.
Next summer, perhaps, I’ll add making peace with the inevitable truth of my summers to the project list. For now, there’s no denying the little frisson of freshness that comes with the starting of the new (academic) year. New students, new classes. New office supplies, even if I do perilous little hand-written feedback these days. (Apparently one can get metallic gel ink refills for multipens now, as well as multicolored pencil leads for the refillable mechanical pencil insert that also fits the multipen, so I’m kind of beside myself. The to-do list is at least color-coded.)
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
~James WrightOver my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
What I’m making: The Tour de Fleece is now ended, even the bonus of the extra week of the Tour de France Femmes, which seems to have extended everyone’s yarny goodness. I did succeed in making my boucle for Le Grand Boucle, despite a number of silly errors on my part, and I learned a lot of useful things should I decide to embark on another boucle in the future.
What I’m reading: I won’t manage the #SealeyChallenge in full, but I had a lovely moment yesterday morning with Jos Charles’s feeld while also working on my English Literature I syllabus. What are the poetry collections you’re excited about?
What I’m writing: My most recent essay for Ploughshares blog, focused on Emma Seckel’s fantastic debut, The Wild Hunt, out now from Tin House: “Isolation and The Wild Hunt.” The essay focuses mostly on the brilliant uses of narrative strategy for effect, but I’ll also just say I properly enjoyed this novel, top to bottom, especially its use of atmosphere for its speculative arc.
The groundhogs, however, appear to be able to phase through the fencing, even though we reinforced the bottom with chicken wire.
The real problem is that there is no such thing as “enough,” no set achievement that would land me, satisfied, come August. Also trying to work on that, of course…which simply adds something else to the to-do list.