It is the end of August, and late summer as I write this. We’re at the point where the so-called lawn has gone yellow and crispy from the heat — on and off, it’s been in the mid-nineties here in New England for the last few weeks — and the kids on my street are moping around at the prospect of heading back to school. Our garden has been a complete bust: last season, it was tidy enough to be photograph-worthy and this year it looks like Grey Gardens. When I went out to check on the tomato/bird situation early this morning with Pete, our terrier mutt, a local school bus rumbled up the street just as I was deciding which box of brassicas looks the worst — the one with the broccoli leaves like Bruges lace, or the one with the cabbage that’s been chewed to its core — and can be yanked out, refreshed with compost, and planted with more cool weather greens so that by the time my book tour is over in late November, we’ll be able to harvest them, assuming no hard frosts. It starts again.
It’s been a peculiar summer, full of hope and enmity, political division and vitriol that has attempted to masquerade as wit. There’s a certain, unmistakable and palpable fear in the air that I haven’t felt since I was a child, during the days of George Wallace, when my parents spoke quietly over the dinner table in what ifs: What if it becomes unsafe to stay. What if it becomes unsafe to go.
What if.
What would we do?
In the Paris Review, Mary Karr describes childhood as being terrifying: A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
But I’m not a child anymore, and if you’re reading this, neither are you, and I’ve responded to this visceral worry by doing what I always do when I’m afraid: writing more, reading more, cooking more. Surrounding myself with the people I love, and who love me back. And going to the water, because water is healing and safe: I know it, and judging from my Instagram and Facebook feeds, so do you. This summer, almost everyone I know has gone to the water, to some bucolic, instinctual place of elemental calm.
Susan used to tell me a story about her beloved grandmother — she died in her hundreds in the early 1980s — who used to bring back buckets of salt water from the Connecticut shore; she did this for her knees which, after she singlehandedly raised eleven children while manually working her acreage as a subsistence farmer, were always sore. As a child, when I was sad, upset, moody, or depressed, my grandmother, Gaga, drew me a short, tepid bath and ordered me to remove my clothes and get in: she’d turn off the bathroom lights (except for the nightlight), close the door, and come back to fetch me half an hour later just as I was beginning to get pruney; she’d wordlessly pour me a cup of weak tea which I’d drink at the kitchen table, silent and at peace.
You’re a double water sign, someone once said to me. Of course you love it; you couldn’t possibly not.
