Hold on

Hold on to this time, these few weeks when the sun is still high and people shed their natural inhibition; women put on cotton dresses, their legs bare and smooth. Men loosen their collars, slip off their shoes, wiggle their toes. Everywhere for a short time, it's summer and we remember only the best parts of ourselves, bare and childlike and smiling, and for a little while all is well, the hardship forgotten.  There are pictures of glinting sunlight and smiling faces and tables laid with checked cloths and salads and stone fruit. Peaches and apricots and cherries and nectarines and plums and pluots, warm, soft, juices dribbling down chins, people not caring. Children with pink cheeks. Adults skipping their steps before they catch themselves. We splashed in streams yesterday in Hansen Dam, surrounded by green willow, blue sky reflected in the rippled water where the dogs had walked, butterflies, white and yellow, flittering from purple garlic flower to cactus to grass, crows in great festive committees commenting on the world, and tiny humming birds.

Hansen Dam, California : June 23, 2014

(I met a woman once who was scared of humming birds. She told me -- with great and authentic alarm -- that they would burrow in your ears and hurt you. They could cause deafness, she said. She told me, with eyes widened in terror, that they'd dive-bombed her in her own garden. And I felt such enormous sadness for this woman who was so out of sync with nature that even a tiny bird was an object of fear. How on earth can one live in this world with such a fear?)

Hold on to this, before it goes. The thing that all of humanity shares is our inability to ever get back a moment. Time passes. It marches like a regiment. And as every second disappears we age.  Hold on to this while you can. Remember the summers of your childhood. Remember the aching knees of having run in the fields all day. Remember the stickiness of hair wet with salt. Remember the feeling in your belly of too many strawberries and the tartness on your tongue of rhubarb dipped in sugar, straight from the terracotta bell jar it grew in. Remember rolling down grassy hills with dogs licking your face. Remember blinking at the sunlight and seeing rainbow prisms across your vision.

This is the summer and it's very, very fleeting.

Hold you children close, tell your loved ones what they mean to you, be kind. At least this is what I tell myself on days like this.