On Summer, Fires, and the Mad Bummer Lady

A re-post from Anne Lamott. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions, and the forthcoming Hallelujah Anyway. Her blog was posted Sunday, August 20, 2023.

“The harvest is past, The summer is ended, And we are not saved.” Thus spake the prophet Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible, who was not having a good day. I may go into Mad Bummer Lady mode and use this as the scripture for Sunday school this morning.

     The harvest is definitely past, or just about to be. We’ve got maybe two weeks left of great peaches and then Fuhgeddaboudit. Don’t waste your money. From here on in, it’s apples apples apples; step right up.

     Plus, and it hurts my heart to say these words, the specter of pumpkin spice. It’s like a demonic possession, pumpkin spice everything; pumpkin spice flavored shoes, pumpkin spice BLT’s.

     The kids are all going back to their pumpkin spiced schools and it’s two and a half  weeks until Labor Day. This is just so wrong. All children, throughout time, and certainly in Jeremiah’s day, returned to school after Labor Day. Nothing familiar is in place—there’s a hurricane hurtling towards Southern California. Lahaina is gone. British Columbia is on fire. British Columbia, the sweetest most innocent place. It’s like hearing that Mr. Rogers was one of the unindicted co-conspirators.

     Let’s move on: “The summer is past.”  Now, to me, this is the good news. Summer is about melanoma. I know that sounds a little negative, but it’s true. Summer is about teenagers and returning college kids with their loud music and litter, and their crop tops.

       Crop tops. I ask you. Did Jeremiah have to deal with an endless parade of crop tops and tank tops, and tiny shorts that my cat could borrow?

      He did not.

     Summer is not for people like me, ie, oldish. Autumn works—cute sweaters, fires in the fireplace where they belong, not burning down gentle countries. (British Columbia has an estimated 300,000 guns in a population of 5 million. America has 400 million in a population of 320 million. 400 million guns. I’m just saying.)

     “And we are not saved.”

     Wow, what a buzzkill. God has picked poor, old, depressed Jeremiah to tell the people of Israel that unless they change ways, towards goodness and generosity, He or She is going to release the kraken. And you just know that 600 BC kraken makes ours look like—well, never mind. Apples and oranges. We don’t have the leprosy or the Girgashites, he didn’t have Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Jewish space lasers; or the crop tops. Or the pumpkin spice.

     But the point is, it is very hard here on earth, all of the time for some people, some of the time for the rest of us. The people we love get cancer, the kids and the grown kids we love scare us half to death or break our hearts, the world is on fire. So what do we do? I guess we do the same things as Jeremiah suggests: take care of the poor, laugh, and celebrate what is still so sweet and beautiful about life no matter what the locusts have stolen. We behave gently towards people no matter how annoying they are—my friend Janine heard someone say that they no longer bring a bat to resolve problems; now they just try and remember to clean the lens of their glasses. Turn toward goodness: goodness causes hope. And hope helps us get our ‘joice back—rejoice a little today no matter what. Keep it really simple. Friendly and radical self care. Maybe take a bag of food to a local food pantry. Or donate to the relief efforts in Hawaii—hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong.

     I think doing those sorts of things would mean we *are* saved for now, which is all we ever have anyway. And for God’s sake, as the musical prophet Duane Allman proclaimed, eat a peach. Okay? Deal?