Summertime Sadness
Navigating life without seasons.
As I write this, it’s 7:36 am on July 31st, 2023. Today is a Monday. I’m in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, California, United States, Planet Earth. It’s 52 degrees outside.
Summer in San Francisco is an endearing misnomer, a dogeared cliche made infamous by Mark Twain’s refrain about the “coldest winter I ever spent.” Those of us who weather the June gloom only to be met with an even chillier July and an iron gray August can’t help but repeat it. We were sold California Dreamin’ but got Summertime Sadness.
When I first moved to Palo Alto from New York in 2016, I was initially overcome by a listless feeling I couldn’t quite place. Every day was the same: 72 and sunny, electric blue skies. The sunshine felt relentless and oppressive, like a forced smile. I’m a winter baby born and raised in Colorado, and didn’t realize how ingrained the changing seasons were to my perception of time and self.
Is it summer if it’s 50 degrees outside with icy windchill? If it’s cold enough to wear a parka but (maddeningly) light until almost 9pm? What is summer without the school year as a frame of reference? If I don’t have a full-time job to take vacation from? What is the weekend without a workweek? What is the office if we work at home? What is the biological clock if we freeze our eggs? What is retirement as life expectancy continues to grow?
How do we orient ourselves when goal posts move and familiar landmarks disappear?
In Montessori school, we observed a birthday ritual that has always stuck with me: We lit a giant yellow candle and placed it on the floor with the calendar months neatly arrayed around it. The class gathered in a circle and observed as the birthday boy or girl walked around the candle to represent each annual trip around the sun, pausing to tell stories along the way. I always found this ritual a wonderfully symbolic representation of our journey through space and time.
I haven’t done the candle walk in years, but I still seek out ways to orient myself. To understand where I am, where I’ve been, where I’m going.
Each day I draw X’s on a paper calendar on the fridge.
Each month I send out this newsletter.
Each year on a day in early March, the sun is high enough on its arc through the sky that it peeks over the neighbor’s roof and sunlight slices through our living room windows. From March through midsummer, rectangles of light stretch further across the floor, Zip stretching along with them and basking in the glow. We have a prism hanging in the window that spins when it catches the light, powered by a solar panel and throwing rainbows around the room in a whirling daylight disco.
And then, slowly but surely, the golden rectangles start to recede, until one morning in late October, they slip away into hibernation for the winter.
A few years ago I traveled to Norway and our guide recounted a year she spent on a tiny island in the Arctic circle. The town could only be accessed by boat and miles of remote snowmobile trails, and she served as the schoolteacher for the handful of children in the ~100-person community. For three whole months of the year, the island was cast into total darkness, the sun never rising. The students would learn by candlelight; they celebrated the winter solstice with sparklers on the dock.
Somehow, despite seemingly insurmountable darkness, every year the community makes it through the winter. And out of the darkness emerges unimaginable beauty: Northern lights glimmering, iridescent, across the sky. A family of reindeer swimming in a neat line to the mainland, their warm breath freezing in cotton clouds above the water’s surface. After descending into total darkness, the earth turns and summer is all light, clear skies, midnight sun.
Following the sun’s path helps me to be present, to acknowledge the passage of time, to mourn the loss of things and celebrate the onset of new things. After all, isn’t that what seasons are? Times of abundance and buzzing activity, contrasted with periods of quiet, stillness, frugality.
While I shiver in San Francisco, record-breaking, fatal heat waves radiate across the country and planet. In a post-Covid, climate-ravaged, ever-evolving world, the notion of seasons is changing. But that doesn’t make them meaningless. It just challenges us to make our own meaning.
As another Annie once said, “The sun will come out, tomorrow.”