Why I dislike July and August as much as January and February.
Though it is sacrilege to say such things in the north country.
Extremes are always extreme.
They’re out there on the edge, at the cusp of flying off into the nothingness that comes from being so far from the center of centrifugal force. There is nothing but imbalance in an extreme, be it politics or personal worldview. What starts as a curious wander to the edge picks up a slow wobble until it becomes uncontrollable chain reaction.
The dead of winter and the dead of summer are the same kind of extreme—no one says the “dead” of spring or the “dead” of fall—because they are the hottest humid hot versus the coldest dry cold. Spring and fall—the beautiful seasons—are the truce between the battles. They have no dead.
For an introvert who looks for excuses to be away from people, who prefers tea and books and museums and darkish quiet instead of bright sun and heat—you can always get warmer, but you can only take so many clothes off—the winter is the lesser of the evils in some sense. Beach vacations are a hideous thought; vacation advertisements with beach and lake life are some circle of hell I know not what. Sun and sand and sweat and sun lotion and human bodies in various stages of exposing underwear—it’s a horror.
Summer up here in North Dakota is daylight almost all the time. The sun sets at 10:30 p.m. and rises just a few hours later, around 5:30 a.m. There is no excuse for laziness in summer, no reasonable explanation for staying indoors to read and think. The obligation to get outside and manhandle the garden and the earth around you is real, creating a strange culture in which certain hobbies, as much as you enjoy them, are relegated to the winter when you are forced to be indoors. Sewing, art, reading—get thee behind me, for the temperature is above freezing and we must be outside in it. We are a slave to the tilt of the earth.
“We only have three months!” is the battle cry, and so all such living has to be crammed into a quarter of the year. The pressure to grab at all remotely outdoor-associated activities is real, and each weekend is a wearying conglomeration of lawn care, gardening, camping, and forced enjoyment of the outdoors. Social media is flooded with people forcing themselves into as much outdoor adventure as they can, no small pressure if you’ve spent the day shamefully indoors and the thought of high exercise versus high tea is a no-brainer.
The outdoors in July and August is a damp, dank, heavy-aired blanket that smells of life and death, a mix of sweet, tangy, or minty weeds, and pollen, with just a hint of decaying flesh where small animals have succumbed to mortality. Wood ticks and mosquitoes vie for your lifeblood, and sweat and sunburn work to destroy your body’s largest organ. The battle against pests—squirrels, rabbits, wasps, thistles, bindweed—is as turbo-charged as the rest of summer life for they, too, have to cram a lot of living in three months. Each year, spring has the hope of a tidy garden and the excitement of seeing new things grow; by August you want to take a flamethrower to the place. June through August, the storms scour the earth, and you hope an F4 finger of God doesn’t drop near you.
By mid-August, I’m desperately hoping for the killing frost to give me relief from the garden and the bugs and the expectations, for the first blizzard so I can sit in my chair and sip tea and read a book without any guilt, for the blissful months where I don’t need to worry about pulling weeds and what pest is destroying what part of the garden today. All of the client projects that are stacking up, that they are “touching base” on, scream at me to be done while I know that the tomatoes need to be dealt with.
Morning walks are ever earlier in an attempt to beat the heat, though the humidity, regardless of the temperature, rests heavy and you curse the dew point. At some point, at the end of July or early August, you consider going for a walk at 4 a.m. just for a reprieve from all the blasted sun and heat. Opening the windows to let in fresh air is made moot; since everyone is outside, so is all of their noise—barking dogs, screaming kids, squeaking swing sets, fighting spouses, leaf blowers and lawnmowers—and it occurs to you that the quietest time to enjoy the outdoors is when it’s too cold to do so. We are all moving in and out together, a human conveyor belt in sync with the tilt and rotation of this blue marble.
But I must be clear about something.
I could never live where there weren’t four distinct seasons; I need the hope that comes in the cycle that provides that hibernation break as well as the re-emergence from sleep, as disappointing and Sisyphean as such a cycle can sometimes seem. The limits in the garden—Zone 3 perennials are much less than the warmer climes—force creativity in partnership with disappointment and crossing your fingers, and the cruelty of winter is like three months of Sundays and forced retrenchment.
Honesty requires me to acknowledge that, having four seasons this far north, so much of life is mostly like unfinished canvases; you might get close, but winter is soon here. Time is never shorter or more personal than in the north country.
