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Summer
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (March 25, 1911) : 23
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      City dwellers remain so sanely right-minded. In spite of small rewards and an army of things to prove them wrong, they bravely keep up, year after year, the feeling that spring is an event and summer the magic climax of the seasons. All manner of delicious emotions inside run counter to exterior actualities. Winter is undeniably the apex of the city year. It is then one gets one’s mill filled abundantly with grist. Winter is undeniably the apex of the city year. It is then one gets one’s mill filled abundantly with grist. Spring is inconvenient, a season of general discontentment, in which one wears shabby winter clothes and asks perfunctorily after other people’s colds. Summer is a dearth of everything, with post-cards from friends abroad to add to one’s depression, work done with difficulty and done badly, and a vacation so inadequate and tantalizing that it is endured with the stoicism due the final blow. Yet the very awfulness of summer in the city is caused by one’s right-mindedness in regard to the seasons being shared by the majority of city dwellers. They, too, have the feeling that the diversions of winter were mere attempts to while away a hibernating period, a long dark time of waiting; and for what were we waiting but this wonderful thing called summer, through which we are dragging ourselves disconsolately, busied in making pathetic attempts at blithesome enjoyment, the women wearing dainty gowns that look bedraggled and out of place, going on ghastly excursions to that distant place called the country, realizing that every hot, spiritless inch of our wearied being proclaims summer to be an abomination, and yet, with a splendid stubbornness at the core of us, feeling that we are wrong, and proofs are useless, for summer is and always will be the adventure, the radiant experience of the entire year?
      It may even happen that we have never spent a spring in the country, so that our tingling anticipation of something wonderful about to happen is not grounded on any past experience, but is just a sign of how perfectly we are made, of how admirably attuned we remain to the seasons, no matter how small their chance of demonstrating their existence and showing us to be rightly at one with them. Then it happens, if it happens as it should, that a whole consecutive year is spent in the country, and one’s calendric feelings sing a continual chant of delight. For once they are not to be fooled. Something beautiful is going to happen, and the something is summer itself. You and the revolting seasons are orchestrated together, each with your separate themes, but entwined, relative, making melody by your combination.
      During the winter months, no matter what your occupation, you had a sense of burrowing. You did not see — that is, anything more distant than the writing and reading directly under your eyes. You did not feel, or at best very sleepily. You just nosed along, sniffing earth and slowly making your way toward something, too comatose to remember clearly what, principally aware of a sensation of cramp from curling up tight to keep warm. Then the day came when you felt prickles, and you straightened up and went out-of-doors. It was out-of-doors for the first time, for during the long months this had simply been a region colder than that indoors, and you walked about looking at twigs with tender little bumps on the end of them, and the air was in a shameless state of intoxication, and it was perfectly obvious to you that everything else was experiencing the same delicious prickling that was mounting so dangerously in you.
      It was like the most stupendous overture, with the dominant feeling your satisfaction at being finally justified. It was like the most stupendous overture, with the dominant feeling your satisfaction at being finally justified. You uncurled at the same tempo as everything else, and the sun got to you and, making no exception because you were just a city-bred human being, warmed and vivified you, which brought such a delightful sensation of being happily, graciously included. Excitement settled in your throat, while you tried to swallow it, but were prevented by parts of it continually escaping in exclamations which very much bored other people who had been on the point of saying the same thing and were injured at having a novel and exquisite emotion like their appreciation of spring made to appear in the least usual or shared. Torn between a fear that the buds might open too soon and be hurt by a belated and vicious frost, and a panic that, if they did not hurry perceptibly, they would not be ready in time, you ran about exhorting them to look lively, but to be cautious. Breathlessly you cut away all dead wood as an intrusive reminder of a mistaken season which would surely never occur again. You dug and planted and planned and agitated, taking hampering mould off shoots so spiritually forcing their way to the light, replacing it as necessary discipline required if the stems were to be long, confronted in your indecision with the question of whether genius should be coddled or made to prove its mettle by the conflict with circumstances confronted in your indecision with the question of whether genius should be coddled or made to prove its mettle by the conflict with circumstances, and in the anxiety for results trying every method with such a variety of after-effects that the question became embroiled, not simplified, showing that modern experiments in a garden are as bewildering as the one originally begun there.
      And at last, with an exalting rush and life, summer comes sailing in on high clouds, drenched in sweet damp fumes and radiating color. That is the great adventure. Nothing more happens; summer just is, lasting through months, with its mellow diminuendo into autumn. Nothing else is required. Your heart and eyes know that it is summer. They keep repeating it over and over, and you look out from Olympian heights to other seasons. You rise as you do every day in the year, but it is to a summer morning. You go to bed, but reluctantly, to a light sleep, knowing that outside is the magie of a summer night. You eat, but without the demeaning winter heaviness, substituting a rabbit-like crunch and nibble at pale green things. Your body is not encumbered with stuffs, but lightly clad in something that looks as much like the big soft rhododendron blossoms as possible. It lies on the grass with the clouds trailing their gray skirts over it, and one’s spirit, freed from winter, soars in its new-found lightness crying: “It’s summer! It’s summer! By our yearly miracle it’s once more summer!”
 

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