Summer in Sepia Tone

Nostalgia is a funny thing

The sun has melted my ability to make any decisions.

I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. Like many things this month, I am also taking a bit of a break with the project as I recalibrate for unemployment and so on. I’ll pick a new organization come August and we’ll continue on then.

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There are two times of the year in New York when it is almost not worth going outside: the height of summer and the dead of winter. In summer, the heat is high, the humidity makes it feel higher, and the dew point (which my friend Kate told me is the actual number to pay attention to), makes it feel unbearable. Plus, there is always a strong smell of hot garbage and pee smell wafting from the baking sidewalks. 

Yesterday, the temperature was 88°, the humidity was between 70% and 90%, and the dew point was just about 75%. And I was out and about with a friend. 

The amount of time I was away from my apartment was four hours and the amount of time I was actively walking around was an hour, maybe an hour and a half? So, not that much time. In the middle of that outing was a lovely 90-minute bottomless brunch. I did not stop sweating the whole time. I sweat less after a while but I did not stop. Even after we got back to my apartment and turned on the A/C, it took me hours to stop sweating. I was almost certain I had heat exhaustion. I rued the fact that I didn’t have a Victorian fainting couch to fall into. I could (can) only think and talk about the weather. My brain melted. I both hate the heat and am a wimp about it.

Summer is the season for which I harbor the most anger. 

And it’s the season for which I have the most nostalgia. 

When I was with my family in June, my Mom and I went to a winery to drink wine with her co-workers. As we laughed and I devoured gossip about people I do not know, a bright light flashed across the darkened sky. It felt like around me most people were not paying attention to the outside world. But every time lightning cracked, I smiled. It was a long storm that lingered right above us. There was one particular flash that shot straight to my heart. When I looked up, a new tone faded into being.

There is always a day in summer, usually sometime in June, where something will wash my world in a sepia tone. Yes, it’s hard to romanticize bags of garbage on the street and grumpy, sweaty people on the subway. It’s impossible not to romanticize a memory of thunderstorms.

On the plains, the storms covered a sky that seemed infinite. First a bright light in the dry air, and then a deep rumble  — beautiful weather wrapped in questions of destruction. Thunder and lightning were certain and fire might not be far behind. 

After my family moved from Montana to Washington State when I was seven, summer was the season we spent the most time back in Montana. Often, it was a few weeks with my maternal Grandmother in Chinook. Hot dry summer days walking through town to get a slushie or to Town Pump for a snack, running to the sun porch to get a popsicle from the porch freezer, swimming for hours at the city pool. I spent a lot of time trying to convince my Cousins to play make-believe with me, casting myself as Ariel and bobbing around below the top of the concrete stairs waiting for someone to join me. One summer, I decorated the walls of the room I was staying in, my Aunt Carol’s old room, with a ridiculous amount of boyband pictures from teen magazines. We kids sat upstairs playing Nintendo games. There were bats in the attic and a basement I never went into. I nearly always had heat exhaustion. (It had to start somewhere.) My Grandmother and her sisters were always arguing about something. My Brother and I were always arguing about something. We were all always laughing about something.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I had a professor in grad school who said nostalgia is a (fond) memory for a time that never existed. I always liked this definition because it rings really true about so many things. If you look around at anything happening, particularly anything happening in politics of any kind, the rhetoric is filled with weaponized nostalgia. It’s a tool to try obscure hate, to try and convince a population of a mythical time or mythical ideals. It is used to highlight a time that was created by select people, an ideal time that is a box we are encouraged (forced) to try and fit in. It is a box that is labeled “one size fits all” but is a size and shape that fits no one person, let alone an entirety. It is a box, actually, that is imaginary. 

I also like this definition in the personal sense, and I’ll speak for myself here, because sometimes I need a fond memory to get me from one thing to the next. My brain needs to send me to a hot July day on the plains of Montana while I slog through the humid air in my neighborhood that is filling my lungs with a wet blanket. My heart needs a memory of laughing with my Brother and my Cousins as we run around my Grandma's house while I am unemployed, sitting alone in my apartment, watching dollar signs fly by my eyes every time I turn on the A/C.

Sometimes, often, two things are true at the same time. Yes, nostalgia is a funny thing that can also be a dangerous thing. And nostalgia can be a balm. It can be that picture window where you sat in a dark room, experiencing a new brightness fill the sky as you had your second root beer popsicle pilfered from the porch freezer when no one was looking. 

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This week, paying subscribers…shhh don’t tell them I forgot! But, if the mystery of all that sounds intriguing to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.