cleothedog

The following essay first appeared in my newsletter, salt air. Please support my writing and follow along by reading, subscribing, and sharing!

Hello all,

Before autumn is completely underway, I have some words to share about summer.

The last few months, and the last year plus, have been life-changing on my end, and a lot of work. At the beginning of summer I birthed our beautiful daughter, and around the autumnal equinox she is about three months old. A true summer baby. These months—of pregnancy, birth, recovery and postpartum, and taking care of a newborn—have been the hardest work I’ve ever done and the most joy!

Like I’ll keep repeating in this newsletter, I’m grateful for changing seasons. I’m not a 70-degrees-every-day-of-the-year kind of person. (Will climates like that even exist anymore? Do they?) In fact, my life has been heavily shaped, from childhood, on the changing of the seasons. With the turn from summer to fall being, possibly, my favorite shift, and fall my favorite season.

But something about the shift to autumn and winter in the last few years has gotten harder for me. I don’t know if it’s due to getting older, struggling more with these seasons’ effects on my mental state, living full-time in a climate with long, cold winters, or some combination of the above, but I may—dare I say it?—be becoming a summer person.

I’ve usually held an unpopular opinion: summer is not my favorite season. When I was a kid, I sort of said that it was—and to some degree that was true, because it was the time of year when I didn’t have to be in school (I liked that). It was also the time we were at the beach the most (then and now, I’m happiest at the beach any time of year). Weather-wise, however, summer was not and is not my favorite. Frankly, summer is too hot, and this is only increasingly so as the earth’s climate gets more and more untenable. The extreme heat of this summer, for example—which was ROUGH when newly postpartum, by the way—is not something I tolerate well.

I do love the long days though. There’s something about unabbreviated days that is soothing. And I love being able to step outside without bundling up or even putting shoes on first—it’s a very specific kind of freedom.

Giving birth and taking care of our baby has made this summer especially intense and beautiful. And the whole past year has been intense and beautiful. Pregnancy is not for the faint of heart, nor is birth, or parenting. It’s hard work! And it contains so much. It has been a journey so far and we’re still on it.

In the dark, cold days of winter I imagined what this summer would be like. When I went for walks in the freezing wind, holding my collar under my chin and avoiding slipping on ice, I thought about how the baby and I would go for walks in the warmth, pick blueberries and raspberries, spend time on the porch. I wasn’t thinking then about all the air quality warnings there’d be due to wildfire haze, keeping us inside on certain days, plus the intense heat waves. . . but even amidst those we have made the most of summer and admittedly I’m not quite ready for fall. Newborn haze and summer haze were one this year, and I’m so grateful.

Here, autumn is already apparent. Temperatures are cooling, some leaves have started turning—even as I insist on continuing to not wear socks. There’s that back-to-school, dry leaves smell. Acorns on the trail.

Maybe in the coming weeks autumn will make me fall in love with it again. But I’ll miss the summer—maybe this one more than any other I’ll experience, even with its many ups and downs, deep beauty and significant challenges. I think this over when I take walks in the evening, the sky highlighted pink and purple. It’s the bridge between summer and fall. What should we call this time?

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