Two Months

A Lot Can Happen in a Summer

“Urvaste maastik” by Jaan Grünberg (photo via Unsplash)

It’s been two months since we last spoke. What can happen in two months?

A lot, apparently.

You can go to France. You can eat escargots with your in-laws in Canada and drive to an ashram in Tennessee.

You can be transformed by a single tart in a pizza place and spend the whole summer trying to get back there—cooking up new things, hoping to find some basic footing in this world, searching for sanity if only in a recipe for potato salad.

You can sit on your porch swing all afternoon and discover a new bottle of Burgundy. You can read new books and old, remembering what it was like to wonder before all you could do was stress. You can be, if only for a moment, before the next thing comes to demand that you make something of yourself.

But I am tired of making me. I want to make things instead.

I want to see the whole world and taste its many flavors of beef bourguignon. I want to know what it takes to make a soufflé and how Annie Dillard can create such magic with words.

I want to understand bossa nova, to see the jazz scales in my mind and grasp what is—clouds brimming at the start of a day, hummingbirds sipping from tiny white flowers on a basil plant.

I want to be more than a parrot of popular opinion.

In two months’ time, you can see the whole world drift by, watching its wars and infighting, its uninformed politics and half-considered opinions. You can float down the river and find yourself in a new place suddenly familiar.

You can call this place home, too, one where you open up all the shutters on a Sunday and let some light in.

You can go for ice cream on a weeknight.

You can tell the truth, if only to yourself.

You can live for today, one day at a time.

And after all the hullabaloo has died down and your memory tries to dredge up the past in some distorted way, you can tell others what it was like.

---