It’s
a small consolation for everything that didn’t happen this summer. The projects
that didn’t get finished. The friends that never got hung out with. The people
that never got met. The dress that never got worn. That beach/park/patio with the
twinkly lights you didn’t spend enough time in. That album you didn’t listen
to. That song you didn’t dance to. That ONE hot night you should’ve gone out,
and stayed out, but didn’t. The superhero costume you were gonna make for your
nephew’s fourth birthday. The health problems that never got sorted.That flight you didn't book. That recipe with the figs and the cheese. The
road trip to Detroit. The books you didn’t read. Oh god, don’t even think about
the books.
Which is what brought me to the park that late afternoon in the
first place – an opportunity to continue reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby which I had started
two months before. And because the Universe is the way it is, and because
Rebecca Solnit is, quite frankly, The Shit, I came across this passage – where
she writes about making apricot preserves - just as I was in the thick of this sappy
wistfulness:
I wish that I could
put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of
love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a
dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead
vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be
admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.
Sentimental,I know, but still. She had
basically just crawled into my brain.
Because what I wouldn’t have done to put
up a handful of those moonlit evenings, as well as that very moment itself –
the (finally!) hot sun on my shoulders, the soft quilted picnic blanket (that I
have yet to finish quilting) under my legs, the smell of the pond (whatever, I like that smell) – the last of the very
few summery feelings I’d had all year. It was all too much. I packed up my
shit, I rode back to the studio, and for christ’s sake I made a fucking
necklace.
It has four Full Moons. Each
one occurs in a month during which I experience some kind of major attitudinal shift or upheaval about life in general: the Harvest Moon in September, the Cold Moon
(or Full Nights Moon) in December, the Pink Moon in April, and the Thunder Moon
in July. How do I know about these moons? Because how could you not google
various moon-related shit after the nights we’ve had?! Farmer’s Almanac, get
familiar. A small cluster of twinkly pyrite stars hangs above them.