Tipping Point

 

Tiny blueberries,

handpicked, lie in small boxes

like orbs of lapis

"Summer," for me, always arrives around July 1, announced by the blooming of the ubiquitous roadside orange daylilies and spires of (fuschia-colored) purple loosestrife. The more delicate June flowers that thrive in showers and coolness quickly fade and give way to these robust, and (to me, anyway) coarser plants, able to withstand long days of sustained heat and battering thunderstorms.

Something in me gives way, too, when I first see them blooming. Just when summer finally arrives here in the north, with our two warmest months still ahead of us, I know that actually the sun has paid his visit and is already packing up and starting the journey south. We wait so long for heat, and I, especially, time the passage of the seasons by this natural calendar of anticipation and succession: the fleeting bloom of trillium and hepatica followed by lily-of-the-valley, poppy, peony, rose, delphinium; the arrival of robins and butterflies, all that meeting and mating and nesting followed inevitably by the gradual toughening of tender leaves and stems, by the fracturing of egg and chrysalis, by eventual departure.

Am I like that too? I asked myself, walking home the other day. Has my life followed a trajectory of tender, idealistic anticipation that gradually ceded to maturity, realism, and an accompanying toughening against the vicissitudes and difficulties, against the knowledge of what's to come?

There's truth to that, I decided, but only so far as I allow myself to be trapped by my own biology; tenderness can persist forever if I carry it inside me, and ripening continues right up to the fall of the fruit.

 

Comments

[Uma]

Beautiful, Beth! Yes, tenderness can persist forever.

[Vivian]

tough, yes, my mother always called them "railroad lilies" with entire disdain.
remember to look when they come at the late roses and breathe deep then too

[Beth]

Thanks, Uma, I'm glad you've seen that too.

Vivian, my grandmother called them the same thing but I'd forgotten! In Vermont that's exactly what they were - they seemed to like growing in the cindery gravel along the tracks. Yes - I just cut off all the faded delphinium stems, hoping to encourage re-bloom in the fall. And, to be fair, there's plenty of more delicate stuff blooming in the garden...

[Rachel Barenblat]

What a beautiful post this is -- words and images alike.

I always find this part of summer poignant. I love it -- I crave it all year -- and yet as soon as it's here, some part of me knows that the days are already shortening and that winter is on its way. I struggle sometimes to be in the moment ("right here, right now," as Lorianne taught me years ago) and to savor the blessings of this season instead of already dreading the cold and the darkness which I know are coming.

And I love the last line of this post. "tenderness can persist forever if I carry it inside me, and ripening continues right up to the fall of the fruit." Yes. Yes.

[Pat]

When my niece got cancer she did her chemo through the winter. The next year, after her relapse, she did the stem-cell transplant and three month quarantine once again through winter silence. We all noticed that that seemed quite appropriate seasonally. Now we’re in the third (and final) go-round with the newest magic bullet antibody. And it’s summer, full blown summer, the season Eve has always called the best. I have to admit, it does feel different. There is a fullness and an ease we didn’t have before.
“Something in me gives way, too,” captures the change in Eve and in me too. She speaks now of the importance of trying your hardest while simultaneously having absolutely no attachment to specific outcome. We have had “anticipation and succession,” “fleeting bloom… gradual toughening… the fracturing of egg and chrysalis” and there will be, one way or another, eventual departing.
Still, “trapped by biology… tenderness persists.” And that is EVERYTHING!
Thank you for your words!

[Sharyn]

well said.
I time it by the frogs waking in the pond, the eggs and then the tadpoles. One day you go out and they are all gone, every one.
It goes by so quickly and seems to take so long to get here.

[Loretta]

I am a summer gal, and always will be. I am already mourning the freshness of the beginning of July as I sit under overcast skies with that heavy humidity that precedes and continues into August. That said, I know once the first snap of coolness arrives, I will be ready for autumn and it's smoky grandeur. It is winter and spring that make me crazy. The dark, the rain, the isolation.

Best to get offline and go outside, I think!