Summer Solstice

Hot down South...

Summer light! Caught this image leaving a friend’s driveway. Wishing everyone a blissful summer! Sending this to you from North Carolina.

After the evening storm, the light in the woods seems as green as the trees. Thunder shook the house so strongly that it felt like the fillings could fall out of our teeth; lightning shot about as though the gods were madly flinging electric arrows. Crazy storm! The dog jumps in a chair and hides his face.

From the screened porch, we swim in a vast terrarium. Three fledglings peep up from their nest behind the jasmine, seeing the washed world for the first time. What a world. Full of birdsong, a faraway owl, and later, when the wine glasses come out, a few fireflies bopping around the bushes. The heavy humidity of the day evaporates and down comes a blessing of cool. We turn up Creedence Clearwater Revival and let John ask if we’ve ever seen the rain. Yes, we have. On this summer’s day…

Time to shuck the corn and get the grill ready. Cube the watermelon and toss it with arugula and feta and a drizzle of olive oil. Time to complain about how expensive the steaks are. My daughter sets the table and lights candles around the porch because a summer night dinner, the hallowed gathering, is about to start and will linger until even the owls have gone to sleep.

Having grown up in south Georgia, I have a lifetime tolerance for humidity. I I like air you could cut through with scissors. We are visitors here in North Carolina, now that we have sold our house and even our car. Vacationers talking about the many lakes we could visit or the coast. But we instead are staying in place with family, cooking together, taking walks, and getting the chance to see friends.

By day, with no house to tend, I’m at work on my book (Ouch—due in March) and reading a lot. A stack of The London Review of Books has accumulated. I wade through the long, dense articles, wondering how people find the time to write at such length. I always find interesting reviews but often feel no need to read the book after such exhaustive treatment. At night, when I fall into pages of small print on, say, the history of Egyptology, I must clip on my new handy book light and could be myself down in a tomb deciphering hieroglyphs.

In the South in summer, I am thrown back to my childhood in Fitzgerald. I could be ten, propped in bed with Coca Cola, peanuts, and The Secret Garden. Or later, a teenager slathered in coconut oil by a pool, reading Look Homeward, Angel. Summers were too hot to do anything but swim and read. I associate all sweltering Augusts with Faulkner, Welty, Agee, O’Connor, Wolfe, Morris, McCullers, all those who named that sense of place I already knew in my bones and set me on a trajectory of lifetime reading.

And I’m back to my old habit—reading two novels at once. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shauāng-zǐ. Both are compelling because of their unusual structures. A novel in letters is risky but Virginia Evans is able to skillfully walk that tightrope, balancing voices and tempos. She has won many prizes for her skill. The Booker Prize winner this year for translation, Taiwan Travelogue also has a tour de force aspect. The structure is like Russian nesting dolls, a book that absorbs another book. I am intrigued and admiring but have yet to fall under the spell. I have just finished Paris, a dreamy memoir by Julian Green.

We are about to return to Italy, and I’m stashing three tomes for further pleasures.

The lemon cover is one of those delicious Taschen Books, as are the other two. The title: The Gourmand’s Lemon.

Upstairs here, I’m sleeping in my grandson Will’s childhood room. He’s off to see the world, studying in China. While I’m reading by the big window, I look up at his bookcase filled with mementos and the books he read in high school. Sweet to conjure him in these objects.

Notes: Handy especially on night flights, when the little seat light isn’t enough. Handy, too, when you’re lying beside someone who asks when you’re going to turn out the light! Glocusent book light.