220716 summer lasts forever
July 16
When we were children, July was the month that would last forever. Summer stretched ahead for unending weeks and weeks, of heat, grass, grasshoppers, running in the sun, running in the leaf-dappled woods, tagging your big toe on a stone, popsicles, maybe even ice cream.
That sense of endless time still envelops me each July. I feel it like magic: the days will go on forever. It is hot and goes on being hot at night and in the very dark dark; hot, so that you sleep almost naked, if you can sleep at all, spend the day almost naked. There was always water - the sprinkler, the creek, even sometimes the beach and hot sand and sandy towels. We went to the creek forever to catch tadpoles, wading in without our shoes, armed with nets and jars. At the cottage we looked for crayfish under rocks in the shallows. There were thousands; blue-gray as the limestone and sand, they darted backwards in a flash, under the next rock. And rain, we loved the rain, sudden and cold. We danced barefoot in the thunderstorms of long ago childhood.
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I have been sleeping outside, for a while in the tent and then, when that was taken down for the wind-storm, I made my bed on the porch. Against the mosquitoes, I strung up a mosquito net I purchased decades ago in Asia, where mosquitoes carry malaria. It is a functional object of art and beauty, white muslin, soft and strong. Last night, Rocky was inside the net some of the time but he never tangled in it or harmed it. He and I spent the night like an old married couple: I woke and was too warm, or he woke and needed to stretch his arthritic hips, and we shifted and made room for each other on the bed, and I covered him up once with a blanket, when it was chilly.
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I have become a frog-watcher. They sit, still and invisible, waiting for prey and hiding from those who might eat them. They are fast and agile now, perhaps with the heat of the days, and it is much harder to catch them sunbathing before they hop, with an "eek!" and a splash, into the pond. I have moved beyond counting: you cannot "count" a sighting, in my rule book, if they have jumped. They are big and small and every one a different pattern as they lie in the mud and sun. They seem to look up at one with their beady eyes, and play a sort of game of chicken - to stay, still as a lump of old wood while you creep closer - or to leap for a sure getaway before it's too late!
Here are gilled tadpoles and an almost-frog, see his tail trailing in the silt. (I want to go and have another look at these little gilled creatures. Are they perhaps not tadpoles?)
The caddisfly larva: yesterday when I saw this small moving lump of pond mud, my father was beside me again, hands on his knees, as he bent to show me the creature, carrying on its back tiny stones and scraps from the lake bottom, pretending to be nothing to eat. * They stick bits and pieces to their fragile bodies with "silk" for protection and camouflage. Pretty smart.
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Rocky comes home from our walks sated, his energy run flowing onto the hill like lightning onto a rain-wet shore. He lies blissful in the sun.
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Evening now, of an endless Saturday, in endless July: if we were twelve again we would be hunched around a campfire, smoke in our eyes clutching sticky marshmallows on long pointed sticks. If we were fifteen we would be five or six of us, in the park, talking big and loud, smoking sneaked cigarettes; or necking in the back seat of a 1960 Chevrolet sedan parked by the creek in the dark. We necked for hours it seemed, but what my boyfriend's sister and her boyfriend were doing in the front seat was very quiet, and, in my naive mind, nothing more than my boyfriend and I were doing in the back. I realize now they were nice boys, the boys of my teen years, we didn't get past whatever base was feeling my breast or undoing my bra - I stopped them there and we went on necking.
It was getting cool on the porch so I came up here to the loft, where the heat of the day lingers. It is quiet and dim: the lamp doesn't push back the darkness much in the high open attic. It feels like a writer's space: spare and unused to activity, only the barest of furniture, no pictures on the walls, no books on the bookshelf or even an artifact to look at.
The night is black; the moon is past full and not yet risen and the owl is calling. We have a resident owl in the lower meadow who heralds each night when the sun has gone. I don't know what kind it is. The bird book is sometimes a wormhole of uncertainty, but thanks to a couple of youtube sites, I have narrowed it down (I think) to a barred or a great horned. The great horned sounds aristocratic and rare - both his description and his call, while the barred sounds friendly and relatable, with a sense of humour. I got these impressions from a video by Jo Atwood, whom I tripped across while googling owl noises. * I think I will go to her youtube videos again; I liked her narrative and the sound of her voice.
Thinking now of summer songs: Summertime Dream, Gordon Lightfoot, Christian Island, also Lightfoot, Summer Side of Life, also G.L! And now I am thinking of the summers of Ray Bradbury stories, endless, running shoes, rockets and imagination.
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The pandemic is not over. You will be telling pandemic stories for the rest of your life. The children growing up around you are covid children, changed forever by these years of plague. Please wear a mask in close places, wash your hands often, and get your next booster. Thank you for visiting. Keep well.
Mumma Yaga
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddisfly
* https://youtu.be/XxdZWLkl-Ss - Barred owl and Great Horned.
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