The Summer Diaries: July
Unsplash Image
Where have all the Julys gone?
I live seasonally. My life and all its ups and downs have always been driven by the rhythms of the changing seasons. And as a person who lives seasonally, I look forward to enjoying the unique delights of each season. No matter how uncertain the times have been, even considering the overwhelming nature of contemporary politics, the seasons have not skimped on those delights - those joys, the centerpiece in the best of times, or a distraction in the worst of times, don’t usually let me down.
So full disclosure. As much as I look forward to fall (I am in Vermont, after all) I absolutely love summer. Perhaps it’s time to qualify: historically, I have loved summer. But the last few summers have hit differently. Summer is precious. It is a very short season in Vermont. June, July, and August are followed by a short, but spectacular autumn, and then let’s face it, the rest of the year is winter. There is a brief period that contains a few days resembling spring, but every Vermonter knows, there is still a chance of snow.
June this year, which should have been labeled as the true Part One of the Summer Diaries, was as magical as it always is. And I am grateful that hasn’t changed. By August, which will be chronicled in The Summer Diaries: August next month, I will be torn between living in the moment of some splendid beach days (which August is known for in our household) and making my fall bucket list as the light of late August starts to change.
But July? What has happened to you? As the calendar ushered in the first full week of the month, I was beginning to feel lost, stuck, and directionless. The Fourth was not celebrated in our household this year. Restless and unsettled, I worried that July would slip away without being fully immersed in its formerly glorious, but rapidly shortening number of days. At this age, I am keenly aware of the lightning speed passage of time. Mid-July already? Last week of July in the date book so soon? Summer’s end often sneaks up on me, so while there is a teeny-tiny bit of July still left, I am trying to figure some things out about my changing relationship with summer. Not a moment to lose.
I am not ungrateful. I love my life. But when something bothers me, now I allow myself to really feel it…to be curious about it. Retirement gives you grace. Although time no longer feels infinite (because it’s anything but!), you do have the time and space to figure out — hopes, regrets, unsettled emotions— things that in the past you might have just pushed away or pretended not to feel. In my late sixties, I am through with surrendering to complacency at best, or giving in to misery at worst. Experiencing July felt like wearing summer like someone else’s too small clothes. I immersed myself in some deep reflection and self-searching to try to figure out why, although coming to a crescendo this summer, the last few “mid-summers” had seemed to feel so different. Was I falling out of love with summer thanks to July?
Before diving deeply and analytically inward, I started, as I usually do, by running this whole “is it me or is it summer?” thing by my husband. I got a bit teary telling him how frustrated I was that I wasn’t “experiencing” the heart of summer in my usual way, and that my summer experience had been going downhill the last few years. “You mean since you retired,” he said. Ugh, I am loathe to put all concerns, emotions, and changes down to retirement or aging. It just feels too convenient, but I will come back to that. It was indeed a fact that my changing relationship with summer coincided with my first full year of retirement, but it actually had begun to shift in the summer of 2020. But I was more interested in getting at the root causes of my summer longing. Why was I “just not feeling it” when I’ve had a seasonal love affair with summer as far back as I could remember, especially July? I had to dig deeper. To do that, my first archaeological stop was my past journals.
I paged through the same summer July days from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 to the present. There were a few things that stood out. And yes, as my husband noted, one of those was obvious: I was no longer working! But for me, personally, that actually meant I was no longer living a school calendar. Having been in the education world for 40+ years right on the heels of being a student for 16+ years, and being the child of a teacher, summer had a unique place in my life. It was the big warm sunny reward at the end of a school year. It was the time when my mother was home and more relaxed. And when I was a teacher, mid-June to mid August felt a lot like it did during my own school days: sleeping in, days of adventures, relaxing, enjoying the sun, puttering around, and then happily anticipating a new school year when August rolled around. Even during the 17 or so years when I was a year-round administrator, evening meals outside full of candle light, cocktails in the steamer chairs, evening concerts, weekends on the deck listening to baseball, vacation get-aways, and lounging in the sun with a book were summer luxuries I counted on and counted down the days to. And July? July was the heart and soul of my summer.
So, in no particular order, here are some of the reasons I have temporarily lost my “heart of summer” mojo, causing me to lament, 🎶“Where have all the Julys gone…”🎶
Subtly Losing the Light…
Recently, I have been seeing posts on Instagram about the light we are losing as the summer progresses onward from the solstice. I start feeling this hard in July. It’s funny, in winter when my husband is reminding me of the increasing light, it’s imperceptible to me — pretty much I’m not buying it. But after the summer solstice? Watching those sunset times come earlier and earlier elicits tiny screams inside me. I do love the light, and I feel the darkening evenings chasing me down in July.
Rosacea…
And speaking of loving the light, this skin condition has put a damper on my summer fun. Guilty confession, I have always been a sun worshipper. As I aged, I became much more careful, of course. But I do love to sit in a lounge chair and read a good book. No beach required, right in my backyard is fine. On my July vacations from work that didn’t involve travel, I looked forward to reading in the sun, carefully choosing a stack of books. Heaven. But with rosacea, both the sun and the heat (the July double whammy) set it off. The medication is no match for the tandem trigger of a bright July sun and 90°.
The Heat, Hard Rain, and Canadian Wildfire Smoke…
And speaking of HEAT! I should probably label this section climate change, because that’s what’s going on here. We may get just short of two weeks of 90° plus days once the July closes out. That is extreme to me. Then, we added the unhealthy smoke of the Canadian wildfires. On top of that, for the third year in a row, Vermont experienced a deluge of rain on July 10, flooding some communities once again. If anyone came looking for reasons not to like July, these three alone would suffice.
Lack of Novelty…
I’ve written about my love of routine in retirement. But I’ve come to realize it doesn’t work for me in the summer. I’ve found the routine days much less satisfying. June is magical to me, and nothing feels ordinary. August is our beach month, and there are lots of picnics and day trips and even some pleasurable anticipation of fall. In the past few years, July has seemed to bring on a summer fatigue for me, and I feel rather lazy. I find myself lethargic and wanting to nap a lot. Before I know it, the day is shot, and the only things I’ve interacted with are the AC, television controls, and the refrigerator handle. Ugh. So for this last week of July, I’m going to get out there and bust the routine. My introvert self says no, my July self says yes, yes you must. It’s just a few days.
The Passing of Time…
To not have felt joy and connection to an entire month of my life at this stage feels almost like sacrilege. In these final decades I may have, it seems like a sin to rush time, to wish it away. But that’s the way I’ve felt about July. Wishing it to be over. Oh, I might feel that way about January, but I still try to make the most of its 1,377 days. I guess I will need to muster up the same fortitude for July in the future. January and other long winter months have the cozy thing going for them. Cozy makes it all bearable. But what does July have? It is without a doubt the peak of summer, but I need to figure out a way to give it heart. The health of one of our pets has made travel difficult this year, and maybe having a summer trip would’ve helped, but in this heat? So I’ll have to give this a lot more thought. At least I have some friend-centered experiences coming up this week to ratchet up the joy and make every one of the last days count.
Missing John and Suzyn (IYKYK)…
Okay, you may not get this one, but it’s been the clearest July absence of them all, and an important reason the month has felt off. My husband and I are big baseball fans, and my team is the New York Yankees. For as long as I can remember, listening to Yankee baseball on the radio has been part of my life. When I met my husband, one of our great summer joys was sitting in the steamer chairs on a July Saturday or Sunday, listening to John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman on a old-timey AM radio station, WIRY. Well last summer, John retired, and at the end of April this year, WIRY went off the air. No more baseball games over the radio. Oh, we have access to a lot of games on television, but it’s not the same. I remarked to my husband that we haven’t sat out in the steamer chairs all summer. “The heat,” he said. Nope. The end of an era. Another part of my life that has become nostalgia.
Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News
I’ll end by coming back to my comment about putting everything down to retirement and aging. Those are facts in my life. I love my retirement and I am actually enjoying the aging experience — well, most of it anyway. Put it this way, it doesn’t depress me, and it serves as a little wake up call, in a good way, for times like these. Being reflective at this time in my life helps to give me clarity, direction, and a deeper sense of agency over my life. Relegating experiences simply to being “older” or being “retired” serves no purpose in continuing to grow as a person and acknowledge the value of my life. Digging into the meaning of July in my life reminds me once again of the seasons, and in particular the seasons of my life. I guess I feel bit displaced from summer as I fully embrace my own “September Song.” Maybe like the animals who hibernate in the winter and estivate in the summer, I need the “lazy, hazy” days of July to rest. I think I’m good with that. If you’ve made it all the way here, thank you for hanging in there with me as I Sherlock Holmes my way through The Precious Days.
