Summer's Final Bow

My town has the most charming ice cream shop.  It's painted in sherbet colors and has a rick-rack of gingerbread trim.  I don't indulge every day but enough to know the owners who winter in Florida each year.  But our conversations are all too brief during the height of summer when a line snakes out past their picnic tables into a grove of trees.  Still, the ice cream is rich and wonderful and worth the wait.

Have you noticed how some things are most beautiful just before they disappear?  Falling stars, brides who depart for exciting new lives, flowers, and of course, tender seasons that cannot last.  Right now I am enjoying summer's swan song - the air is warm and balmy and the sun is throwing stirring shadows and light;  total eclipses notwithstanding. 

Knowing that summer must soon end, I find myself holding on to it for dear life.  I love the plump native tomatoes in overflowing bins at the market.  As my mother taught me, I eat them like apples as I sit on the front stoop watching juices flow down my arm.  It's ok because the garden hose is still unraveled in the side yard just as it always is until September - I'm a lazy hose-mistress to be sure.  Every Friday, I buy a farm-style bouquet filled with sunflowers and violet asters along with spikes of golden rod and dried beach fronds.  My rustic bouquets don't last as long as the prim blush roses I bought in early summer, but the colors are as warm and bright as October sunshine.

As well, I am getting the most from my liberating wardrobe.  Making sure each morning I select knee-skimming skirts with sleeveless tops or pretty dresses with billowing potential should I still find myself still wearing it when I fetch the recycling bin at the bottom of the driveway every Wednesday night.

As for perfume, I can't stop spritzing my eau fraiche blend that I keep cool in the refrigerator.  It's light and airy and not yet too weak for summer's final bow.  My coral lipsticks, a watercolor silk scarf, and other accouterments still call out to me.  I won't rush the goodbye because the hello takes so long.  

I'm sure I will surrender when summer turns back just long enough to take a final bow.  By then, I'll be longing to light some candles against a dark sky and chilly wind.  And it will seem odd to see the dried leaves flitting and falling on my garden hose.  I'll put that to bed along with the rattan furniture and the clay pots that are holding my spectacular geraniums and begonias which have never looked more gorgeous as they do right now in their vivid hues of reds and pink.  They seem to bloom over and over and over, like the last dazzling firework on July 4th.  

I'll miss the crickets and frogs which lull me to sleep and the dove that coos from a distance late in the morning.  I'll miss the cold gazpacho I finally mastered and the watermelon and corn.  But summer will really be over when the little pastel ice cream shop finally shutters its windows and closes its doors.  They'll put out the scratchy homemade sign that reminds us they will be back next summer.  And each year...I try to believe them.

(Top image by Trent Gudmundsen)

Seven Daffodils

Today I left my handbag in a grocery cart at the market.  I remember pushing the cart into a train of other carts and then driving home.  I didn't notice for several hours that my purse was gone until I went searching for my cell phone which is always waiting in my bag.  I remained very calm.  I drove back to the store and asked the manager at the courtesy desk if anyone had turned in a purse.  After several long minutes, it was handed back to me.  The manager told me that a woman had found it in the cart and said she almost took it home because it was so pretty.

It is a pretty little bag and I just bought it.  It's coral with a nice outside envelope for my phone.  Everything was intact and I'm glad the woman who found it, didn't take it home after all.  Things could have been very complicated had it been stolen.  The strange calmness I felt earlier was replaced with overwhelming gratitude and my mind wandered on the way home as to what I would have done had it turned out differently.  Where would I start?  With the cell phone or credit cards?  What about the check I had tucked away in my wallet?  How many zeroes could be written on that check?  Enough to wipe me out?  I shuddered.

A few weeks ago I went to a Jonathan Edwards concert.  It was a beautiful spring evening and the small theater, an old brick courthouse, was filled with a nice group of fans.  A warm scented breeze drifted through the transoms on top of the old windows which were propped open with short sticks of wood.  Edwards was barefoot and convivial.  He sang a few favorites and then a song I never heard before.  I'm not sure how I missed Seven Daffodils during my folksong-loving days but I was captivated with the poignant melody and the lyrics. 

It's a quietly pleasing piece about a lover without a fortune of his own who cannot give his beloved pretty things.  He tells her that what he can provide are moonbeam necklaces and rings, crusts of bread, and seven golden daffodils. 

Now I've heard that love won't pay the rent and the rumor is that marrying for it the second time around is pure folly.  But I know from personal experience that money can't hold your hand as you await CT results in the ER at midnight.  And I never turn down bread, with or without slabs of butter and really  - doesn't moonbeam jewelry sound positively enchanting?  As for daffodils, they make me feel as grateful as I felt tonight when my lost handbag was at last dropped into my waiting hands.

~

 I would rather Meg marry for love and be a poor man's wife than marry for riches and lose her self-respect. ~ Marmee (Little Women)

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd...

 

Those are Walt Whitman's words.  The poem seems to be an ode to spring but in his later years, Whitman admitted he was writing about the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln.  That April, the lilac purportedly bloomed earlier than normal which made the unspeakable loss of the president all the more sorrowful to Whitman. 

 

Lilacs seem to mingle with our very souls, their scent is so dazzling.  And since most of us encounter them first in childhood, we have enduring associations with these purple blossoms.  Our yard growing up did not host a lilac bush but my best friend across the street had some ancient ones.  I remember picking bunches and bunches of them and then watching as her mother placed them in crystal clear glass vases throughout the house.  We brought some to our teachers after burying our faces in the cold blooms on our walk to school.  But the fragrance of lilacs builds to a crescendo quickly and then suddenly...they are gone. 

 

Because the time of lilacs is fleeting in proportion to the potent emotion they garner, it makes sense that Whitman uses them as a metaphor for the unencumbered past.  He longs for the innocent time when lilacs seemed to bloom unceasingly, only to realize that as they return each season, he remembers loss and bereavement.

 

All this is not to say that lilacs depress me.  They do not.  I do wish they lasted longer - at least until the roses and peonies replace them in June.  Lilacs will always remind me of my best friend, her mother, my mother and grandmother.  My wonderful teachers.  Spring school assemblies outdoors.  Friendships.  Music.  The first picnic.  May baskets.  Mother's Day.  Proms.  Spring dresses.  And oh yes...love.  Always, always they remind me of love. 

 ~

 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,

And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night;

I mourn'd-and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! Trinity sure to me you bring;

Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the wet,

And thought of him I love.

~Whitman