Summer Solstice

(by Nina MacLaughlin)

There are, for sure, things I like about summer: evening walks, swimming in the ocean, stepping out the door without having to think about whether I’m wearing enough clothing. But also, this is not really my season. I’m a pale redhead who requires lots of sunscreen; heat and humidity are challenging for me; I’d rather come in from a cold and windy day and curl up with a blanket than have to take an end-of-the-day shower to rinse off summer sweat and grime. So I appreciated this essay about summer by someone who likes winter more.

I read this the day after the summer solstice, then read it again a week later; this one doesn’t hit the same for me as Winter Solstice did, but it wouldn’t, would it? Still: there is something to be said for the green of summer, the blossom, the light, something to be said for “the fat red tomato sliced thin and salted,” for how summer “invites us out and up.” I fully agree with MacLaughlin that swimming “is the best part of summer,” and I love how she writes about it: the “surrender” of it, “the possibility of being held and the possibility of drowning,” the sense of the vastness of the ocean, “incomprehensible.”

In this short book, as in Winter Solstice, MacLaughlin writes about personal memories/experiences of the season and also about larger cultural/historical tropes or tensions. This one has a lot about pleasure vs. obligation, the grasshopper and the ant and all that, but I was less interested in the parts about freedom vs. constraint and more into the summer specifics, sweat and all.