A Lull
B&B, Amherst, Mass. Silent ‘h,’ as the BBC (?!) notes in this awesome little intro.
These days between the summer solstice and fourth of July feel to me like a distinct, particularly resonant micro-season, summer fruits and veggies only beginning to peak here in the northeast U.S., daylight already getting shorter. The woods sound drier, fuller, frogs and insects different than in May, but no cicadas or August peepers yet. A lull. Most evenings you don’t need to bring a sweater (though you’d better bring mosquito repellent).
I am horribly vague about what I was up to ten years ago at this time. Living in Manhattan, designing… but entire months are largely blank. I remember projects, clients, and starting to think I wouldn’t be able to stand being a staff artist much longer (say what one will about the Freelancers Union—overall, mad props).
Flame. Such nostalgia, simply seeing it… but not for 15+ hour work sessions.
Twenty years ago my family had moved into a hotel in Diegem, Belgium before returning to the States. After breakfast my mother and I drove back to our empty house to clean. Our usual pâtisserie was en vacances for the month so we bought lunch at one we’d never gone to our entire time living there, though it was only a few kilometers away. The best brioches ever.
One day there was a general strike, farmers driving tractors at a walking pace down the Ring road. I worried lest we find the brioches sold out for the day.
Thirty years ago this week we were driving across country, from Seattle to the east coast. In my memory, ash from Mt. Saint Helens still coated the snow high up, but when I went to scan in photos I saw that the ash I remembered was on a day trip to Mount Rainier, a few weeks earlier. Of course now that I think about it, the North Cascade Highway—with all those terrific town names, Sedro Woolley, Concrete, Twisp—was far out of range of the eruption. For how many years have I recalled it, clearly and wrong?
