Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time. - John Lubb
Hello September. Goodbye Summer. It is a farewell that always feels too soon. Another summer gone and many of my ambitious plans undone.
This summer was...fine. Not spectacular. Not abysmal. I didn’t travel (the furthest I got was the suburbs). Just many, many days and nights marked by a heat-soaked, pandemic-coloured ordinariness.
And yet.
The mere fact of summer is magic. There is sun. There is COLOUR. Everywhere and everyone is saturated with light and heat, effervescent with energy and aliveness. Magic was everywhere.
In The Kitchen: Embarking on Gastronomic Adventures.
I am a late-blooming kitchen adventurer. A novice food gastronomer, newly discovering the simple pleasures of experimenting with new ingredients and gadgets. For clarity, my kitchen set-up looks nothing like the photo below.
This summer, inspired by Food52 and Cookie + Kate, armed with boundless hope, dullish knives and a kickass playlist, I romped through recipes starring summer produce - with some great and some lacklustre results.
There were summer salads with fresh herbs; crumbles make with bursting-with-sweetness peaches; butternut squash cast iron pan frittatas; cold tomato soups; tomato, feta and basil salads; cucumber fridge pickles; cucumber and yellow squash salads with avocado (the summer squash was my improvisation); cucumbers in smoothies; corn; watermelon juice dripping down my chin at my kitchen table.
In The Company of My Mother: Slow Walks Going Nowhere.
At various times in my life, my mother has been a source of inspiration, frustration, admiration, resentment, bafflement, sadness, gratitude and guilt. Like many a mother/daughter relationship, our history has often felt like a push and pull of being unknown and unknowable to the other.
But over the course of many slow walks this summer, my mother came into focus for me. I saw her, I think, really for the first time. This version of her. She - fairly frail, wonky-kneed, 78 years old, cane user. Woman aging. Fearful in some ways, fearless in others. Slow walker. Not the woman of my childhood nor the villainess of my internal diatribes. Passionate lover of dogs. Flower reveler. Graceful human.
In Nature: Grounding in Green Space.
Urban green spaces saved my sanity during the pandemic. I escaped into the minimal shelter of their bare-leafed trees during the long winter. And this summer, when they were gloriously rioting with color and sound, I often lay in the dappled shade of a tree, staring at the sky, threshing the grass with my bare feet. I find putting my feet on the earth deeply restorative and it turns out that there is actual there is science that shows that this kind of contact can produce nearly instant changes in a variety of physiological measures, including helping improve sleep, reducing pain, decreasing muscle tension and lowering stress.
There were also Sunday morning serenades by a 6-piece big band for the early morning coffee grabbers. Chatting with my friend while her kids had their final t-ball practice. Watching the endless new puppy parade.
Where did you find your magic this summer?
