a prelude for july

Traditionally July is about the time that Summer finishes her morning coffee and gets going in earnest; the clouds part and the occasional summer rains vanish and for several months she is the unquestioned queen of the region. This year . . . it's hard to say whether it will be a return to form, but the extended forecast certainly suggests it will take a bit longer than usual to get there. I can only hope that this will indeed dampen the threat of wildfires, which so often start around the fourth of July weekend.

Summer is an interesting time of year. I often wonder how much of our association of summer with vacations stems from the school year; or perhaps it's the reverse, that children get a summer break because summer is the time we go on holiday. But there's a poetry there, the endless days listing lazily in the summer sun, that period of time when doing nothing is the thing you want to be doing. Does our culture celebrate summer this way because of some intrinsic quality of the season, or do we think of the season this way because of our celebrations?

Some days I miss when I could enjoy a July 4th barbecue and fireworks show. It's hard to think of our dying empire now without regret, as its institutions bleed and die and those whose theoretical job it is to at least staunch the bleeding are too busy worrying what sort of precedent it would set to apply gauze to a gushing wound. But even before the death of our empire was so obvious, the excessive patriotism of it all, the callousness of fireworks to those who are sensitive to it (and to the environmental damage it causes) . . . it's hard to enjoy it, even if the individual trappings of a barbecue are something I will always find enjoyable.

There is an impulse, I think, to try to go back to the times when we could enjoy things without consciousness of their problems within the context of the world we live in. So much reactionary thought, especially online, is a fear that we will lose our innocence if we continue to learn. That it is better to watch the fireworks than to worry that somewhere nearby, someone with PTSD will be unable to enjoy their evening because of the sounds. That it is better to celebrate the concept of America than to contemplate what America is.

Still, here in Seattle, for many people, this is the official start of the summer, however listless she may be this year. And even if it is far from my favorite season I like to celebrate them all.