Midsummer Nights

The sky was clear last night, and the air was a bit humid, but the air was still light—there was a soft breeze. Humid enough for a touch of haze to lighten up the sky and make the stars waver more than twinkle, not humid enough to keep me off the porch. The sky—it was midnight blue, verging on royal blue, and not the black void that seems so characteristic of winter or big cities with too much light pollution. Outside smelled like a pool, like fresh cut grass, and something sweet; part perfume, part flower, part beach, and I’ve never been able to really identify what that smell is. I only know that the smell makes me remember.

It makes me remember climbing the dogwood tree in my grandmother’s yard at dusk with a fistful on honeysuckle flowers to pull apart. It reminds me of sucking the nectar of their stems.

It reminds me of sitting in the deep shadows of a church playground across the street, talking over all the big, esoteric questions of teenage existence.

It reminds me of midnight’s walks through a small, sleepy town with my best friends.

It reminds me of pressing my face to the screen of my bedroom window on a summer night when I could not figure out how to write down just exactly what I was feeling.

It brings me back to soon after Kyle was born-- one of those few times I let my infant son out of my sight--, laying in the middle of a hay field that really needed to be cut, reaching three feet above my head, viewing the evening sky through a periscope of softly waving grass and a overabundance of firefly twinkles.

Memory is an amazing thing.

I do not know if there are any others that feel the same way I do, but I have become so acclimated to the academic year—through work, through my children’s schooling and my own—that I feel as if this season, this time, actually marks the end of the year. To me the long, hot, languid summer days, and especially the qualities of summer nights mark the transition from one year to the next, one chapter of my life closing, another opening. Of course, my birthday being in the summer probably aids this misdirected sense of awareness.

I have a big birthday coming up. J says I focus too much on this. J says I focus too much on the past too.

I understand his point, but I disagree. I don’t fixate on the past—I just reflect on it over and over again--especially at this time of the year.

Why those memories, those experiences? What does it all mean? What will it all look like, all of the pieces together, at the end? What kind of memories will my children have?

Several years ago I sat in on a lecture regarding the ethics of killing. I can’t remember much about those arguments, per se. I got caught up in one amazing epiphany. There was a Catholic priest early on, making a rather eloquent argument against killing; no matter your morals, your sense of duty, or what may be best for you or your loved ones’ happiness. His argument was that human life was sacred above all, and not for any particular religious reason. It was sacred above all because we are the only species of animal known today that is reflexively aware. In other words, we are aware that we are aware.

The power of that thought was enough to supersede all others for me that night. I’ve come back to it several times since then. I took his epiphany and made it my own, despite the fact that we have virtually nothing in common-- the least of which is that I am not Catholic.

No matter who you are, or what you do, or even what you believe in, there are so many things in the mundane, the day to day tasks, the everyday life moments that can suck the anima out of your spirit. Any way that you can reconnect to that spirit is a blessing. For me, it’s remembering. The sense of memory and the knowledge that I can reflect on my memories is calming and overwhelming to me at once. Also, the idea that someday, in a future nearer than any of us would like to imagine, that assorted collection of perceptions might make sense once fitted in a picture larger than I can fathom.