Summer is a comin’ in

Fibre art by Helene Driscoll

Melissa Kirsch in the New York Times

June! Again! I know! Where has the time gone? It’s boring to even raise the issue — your subjective experience of the months and years passing so quickly, how it seems just yesterday you were doing something (making plans to see Barbenheimer, maybe? That was last summer!) and now here we are, doing this again.

If summer is a play, June is its opening act. If summer is a feeling, based on my recent conversations, it’s either hope or dread. For me, it’s all hope, all anticipation. Let the longer days spread out before us. Let us spread ourselves out in them, lie down in the grass or on the beach or in the air-conditioned splendor of the living room, early afternoon, for a climate-controlled snooze.

Last weekend, in the country, I had a run-in with a bunch of winged creatures — wasps, I decided, based on the scientific description I found on an exterminator’s website: “Generally speaking, wasps are much scarier looking than bees.” No nest in sight, but a bunch of them, thronging the porch. Perhaps because I spend most of my time in the city, with its predictable insect population, I had almost forgotten about wasps, about yellowjackets and hornets and the menace I’ve always associated with their presence.

Fear of wasps is rooted in childhood, deep and reflexive. Don’t move, don’t look them in the eye, don’t even acknowledge their presence, or else. As a child, one wasp in the house was reason enough to flee until an adult could dispense with it. Now, ostensibly an adult myself, I observed myself observing the swarm, feeling that fear surge and then subside. Here were emissaries of the season, summer’s welcoming committee. I could sip a lemonade beside them and, if not exactly relax, then at least contemplate remediation. Where had the time gone? When did the fear of being stung become manageable? I looked at the wasps and thought, “Yes, you too.” If I am going to throw open my arms to welcome the sunlight and barbecues and lake swims and the air that’s the exact same temperature as my skin, then the wasps are invited as well.

“I think the extra sunlight makes me manic,” my friend Leigh texted me this week in what sounded like despair. Leigh’s one of my seasonal adversaries, the people who greet June’s arrival with dread. We engage in this back-and-forth every year, whenever the season changes, me twirling around in a sundress, her grimacing under a comically large-brimmed hat. I’ve heard her arguments against: the heat, the sweat, the perils of midday sun and the ordeal of sunscreen, the pressure to be always doing things. I want to tell Leigh about the wasps, about how expansive and openhearted I have become this year, but I don’t want to gloat too much, and I’m aware I may sound slightly deranged. “THE DAY NEVER ENDS,” she texts, as if that’s a bad thing. “The day doesn’t end, you just give up and go to bed when it’s still light out.” Maybe we both sound deranged.

It’s June again, whether you’re apt to rejoice or just surrender. It’s June and “The green will never / again be so green, so purely and lushly / new,” as the poet Marge Piercy put it. That alone, the brand-newness of the month and the season, the brand-newness of who you or I might be this time around, might not be enough to make you love this time of year, but perhaps it’s enough to make you curious, to consider how you might be different, to consider whom or what you might, this year, admit into your summer plans.

Not in the mood yet? Here you go. Gag!