“Wintering” becomes “Summering”

“Wintering” is a season turned verb that served us during lockdown. During the 14-month hibernation, people proposed ways of thinking about dark days by developing a cool state of mind, lowering one’s emotional temperature so one could be nurtured by the reality of whatever comes, not what we create.  

Now comes “summering.”  Only wealthy people “summer,” people have long cried!  But the way we collectively re-verbed “winter” is being done with summer too.  We’re seeking a summer of the mind, because we’re still at home and time is moving on.  Call it a return to lightness.  The painters had their favorite spots for light — Provincetown, the south of France — yet on these cool, not-quite summer mornings light pours around a doorway in the house, streams through branches in the garden, becomes seamless in the sky. 

Vibrations of color are equally ubiquitious. The soft pink clay of the French Open tennis courts is sumptuous, filling the screen, floating like a painting shot with variations by Rothko.  Into the fourth hour of the men’s final, the pink clay becomes deeply musing, absorbing twilight and allowing bits of light to fringe the edges the field, suggesting terracotta or crenelated rails of a medieval castle.

My grown kids wander in — leisurely, streaming with of an uncomplicated sense of ease.  Voila lightness, joy, beauty! We’re getting a jump on the solstice, we’re summering. 

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