The shelf life of summer
Early fall light in Toronto is clarifying.
In the morning, a little late. Coming in through my living room windows thinner than the buzzy, wide-as-a-preamble August sun. In the afternoons, high and still hot under a breeze that lifts your skin to meet it, and slanting earlier, longer, from 3pm until it sinks around 7:30, soon 7, after that, I don’t wanna talk about it. The evenings gone purple, a bruised lavender that climbs from the ground up after two months of stomach-ache pink that dripped down to the horizon. A chill rises when the sun sinks, you crack the windows, the air clear.
September in this city is dressing with full confidence in the morning, layering for the cool still clinging to the air and being undone by noon—all the parallels you can draw from that to your life. Thinking you’ve made it through summer mostly together and coming apart the second the weather starts to turn.
I love the fall for what it always dumps on me. Answers, dredged up from deeper than I feel equipped to deal with after skimming all summer. Answers, sometimes sharp, without my having asked, but there like teeth flashing in the new thin dark of evening. Answers after thinking you’ve already got ‘em, didn’t want ‘em, forgot the question, but answers all the same and always at once, happy to make a little more room for themselves where you think you’ve none.
I will get to the fall soon, as it really gets here, and the way it draws certain parts of your life always to a close. The natural symbolism of the season, everything alive around you shedding itself in drifts that you can do your best to gather up and bag or else let blow away because it doesn’t really matter, those parts are over with. But I’m not there yet. I’m squeezing out the last of summer with nails freshly done in a colour called Melon Coral, having a hard time letting it go, because this one felt so lucky.
It started with a definite chip on its shoulders, a championship title, that had what felt like an entire city in the streets. Early July in the desert, my Champions hat still with its holographic stickers and ruler straight brim, watching basketball under temperatures that curl asphalt up at the edges. Early July in the desert, an earthquake, a lot of fresh faces to fix upon familiar names, losing Kawhi Leonard, falling asleep thinking, for sure, this hotel with its velvet upholstery at every opportunity is going to shift to rubble around me in the night from aftershocks. Banking in from Nevada, breaking through the clouds, Toronto alive and breathing, exploded in green and feeling homesick for the permanent heat mirage rising off every shimmering, sun-bleached surface. The rest of July spent at home in water, at home in water. Lakes, mouthfuls, swimming so much my hair was always half wet and finally pinpointing its the same feeling you get from swimming long stretches, tumbling in water, that exhausted, wrung out catharsis, as you get from crying for hours.
This summer was less walking the four doors down my street to the tiny, but well-equipped corner convenience store built into the bottom floor of a house in pool slides, and whatever clothes stood the best chance of not touching my body for sticking right away to sweat, than it was to standing at the edge of water and waiting for the off-beat in the internal countdown you always get, leftover from being a kid, to push out and crash in and under. It wasn’t the low broil of a city oozing its day-stored heat after dark, it was instead open air. It wasn’t time spent on scaled rooftops with all my friends at once, lighting expired fireworks from the known stores that sell them under the counter all year long, but it was a lot of time spent first in rooms, stadiums, filled with strangers, time spent alone and then, in between, time spent sprawled out with two or three people at a time whose company, even if it had been months, felt familiar as muscle memory. This summer wasn’t the one I expected, at all, but came on like déjà-vu: stretched out, dreamy, several woozy lurches and a lot of checking to see if it was real, was happening.
For the first time I feel like I jumped the shark, seasonally. The realizations that always hit me hardest come fall ran through summer like veins of quartz going through the Shield rock I was climbing out of lakes to lie on or else, snaking like ozone up your nostrils before the storm is on you. Individual little explosions, affronts, jabs I didn’t always dodge right, peppering the longest days of the year but either spread out enough I could handle the weight, or to show that maybe, after a while, you’ve handled so much, at such bad times, that you haven’t belonged to one quantifiable fighting class for a long, long time.
I’ve been tired, in one way or another, all summer. The playoffs set a pretty gruelling precedent that so many of us got used to, but look how they paid off. Being exhausted and happy seemed the symbiotic mood of summer. The lows, the shootings on Toronto’s parade day, being caught in a crush of bodies moving faster than volume would let them, single shoes yanked from pairs littering Nathan Phillips Square with the people wearing the other one too terrified to come back and claim them, the lows themselves were caught up in the same quick current carrying us through, eddies of trauma, of grief.
Lows like how hard it hits me, and so many other women, who are so tired of hearing about the progressive nature of the league as its stars are recorded snarling death threats or else recorded on bodies as bruises and bites. A league whose future leaders, one of its youngest coaches, already marked for how progressive his footsteps will be as he walks, easily, from one franchise to another to take up a new head coaching position as a sexual misconduct investigation against him that hardly got off the ground is lifted.
I get tired of talking about how tired I am of it. I took a week between the last Feelings and this because every time I started I thought, why? The wind up that usually comes from getting started on these never showed up. On one hand, I want to stop talking about allegations, about being let down by the people you carve out space for based, naively, on your own belief system. It’s a never-ending tail chase with stakes, with what can change, firmly against you. But on the other hand if I don’t—if we don’t—keep up the same, repetitive racket, then the stories go silent. You know like nights getting colder that the summer will be treated as a shelf life for allegations, investigations, coverage of these things, and come the pre-season, which comes earlier every year, these stories will expire.
I spent the first day of August swimming out halfway to the point between lakes in the Haliburton Highlands, and the last day of August swimming out to the point. There’s a skinny birch there that every year leans progressively lower and lower to the water, straining hard for the surface, pushing what its roots will allow, can stand. One day it will strain too close, tip in, sink to the bottom to expand, come apart, finally settle. Water up there that late in the season shoulders the same brightness as the air, a chill around the edges. Tops of the furs and cedars fading green brushing against powder blue.
The dogs almost trampled a monarch butterfly this morning. The sun was only starting to climb, my toes in pool slides, a real desperate September move, wet from the grass in the park we just left. You forget how big they can get and this one, on the sidewalk, wings slowly flipping out then snapping shut tight to its body, was huge. Maybe it got wet from the grass, or the cone flowers drooping in the garden adjacent, or the giant hosta leaves shining with dew. Maybe someone touched it.
I looked around for a leaf big enough to handle its weight, found a brittle maple with black spots, slid it slowly under. The monarch climbed forward, its needle thin legs reaching. Did it know, do they know, or was it kind of instinctually short circuiting having been waylaid on a long trip south.
There have been so many around this summer, more than I can remember in years. The only time I’ve seen more than this was a summer when I was a kid and essentially lived in the forest behind my parents house. One afternoon, like they’d been there all along, every low tree branch, bush, felled tree, rock or plant sturdy enough to support the weight was covered in monarchs. I know they stop en mass during their migration but that was the only time I had ever seen them there, this tiny patch of woods in a pocket of Scarborough that felt forgotten to everyone but me. I walked up and down the single-person paths, most of which I’d cut myself, and watched them dangling, turn over, fan their wings in the sun filtering through the canopy. They stayed for a couple days. I told my parents and my brother and brought a few of my friends back. Someone, I don’t remember who anymore but I do remember, vividly and with something like heartbreak, the flurry when a stick was lifted and smacked against a bush, against the mass of them. The orange wave that went up, up, to the tops of the trees and then out. They were gone the next day and never came back any summer after that.
Safely transplanted into a mulch pile between plants in someone’s front garden I left this one, and shooed away Captain’s nose when he realized the huge thing was moving, alive. I’m hoping it only needed the sun to dry off and get going. But there are moments like that, when you are handed either luck or a pause in what can feel like time, your life, which is another kind of luck, and you can wander through it, knowing it will go, take something like a branch to knock against it, or else tender the luck. Luck will always leave you, the moment always ends, but recognition can occasionally amplify it, draw it out or call it back in a wide circle, nostrils huffing at your outstretched hand. It’s nothing mystic, only having both your eyes open for once and your senses fixed, opting for buoyant over dregs. Like attracts like and even then, sometimes you can spit shine what’s half good once its dimmed in your hands from turning it, over and over.
There’s something about being in water—and you can tease me all you want for how heavy I’ve dipped all summer into this imagery—that feels feral. The right kind of reconvening with what it means to ask your muscles for something, them to respond, and that’s all the kind of thinking you do. With what it means to be alone. To no longer romanticize with the anxieties that cause your heart to strain, your head to cloud, that demand for an instant response in a moment that would be better off with none. You can’t lose the signals of your body when you are asking it to keep you afloat in the immediacy of what can sink you.
(Finishing this off, thunder boomed so hard I heard it through headphones and sheet rain hit, fast as a car wreck. Lightning’s strobing the sky and sirens have started up in the distance, they always seem called on when storms like this come on. It’s heavy. I clicked the desk lamp off and can see in the streetlamp light, when the boughs from the big maple across the street aren’t bowed against it with wind, how the road, sidewalks, are already flooding. Sometimes the best bet for a break is an invitation from the natural world to render us mute for a minute so we can stare, relieved.)