Summer's Descent

On the duality of sadness and summer

August has arrived like an unbuttoning. Like the end of a long, sweet day. One where the evening has come upon you so unexpectedly you didn’t even notice - it’s hard to notice when it’s still light out after 10pm. July felt like the sort of month where you sit on the sofa at the end of the day and don’t turn on the light yet because it’s not quite dark enough to warrant it. You leave your shoes on and the window open and listen to the outside world, perhaps a little dehydrated, maybe a little tipsy on warm beers, maybe smelling of barbeque smoke. A body all heavy and happy. Sleep about to hit - you’ll have to rush to brush your teeth in time.

how most of July looked! foggy dreich weather - and yet, still so beautiful

vignettes of summer and her descent

i

From the caravan, it’s an easy walk down to the water. I take the foraging basket and a pair of scissors. I tuck my headphones around my neck but I never end up using them. Not long ago I couldn’t go anywhere without music in my ears. The ground is soggy from an earlier downpour and my hiking boots are still damp from a walk a couple of days ago through boggy woodland, but the light is so beautiful and I’ve been itching to try to make a meadowsweet tea.

As I make my way through the field full of almost fully grown lambs towards the loch, towards the patch of meadowsweet blooms, I think it’s almost laughable how different my life looks now. That a year ago, a Friday night in summer would’ve consisted of drinks in a pub, or maybe by the harbour in Bristol, soaking up the last hours of sun after work with a throng of people ordering takeaway pints.

I can’t lie; I miss it. The buzz of summer in the city, the endless excuse for a drink after work, for bumping into friends-of-friends, for staying out late and walking home in the relief of evening air, for the parks full of people making the most of the simple enjoyment of lazing outside.

ii

And in the drunken lights 
- and in the clammy city heat - and in the dusk - and in the chip shop window - and with the vinegary salty grease on my fingers - and with the hair stuck to my face - and with the dilated inebriated pupils 
      - your face looked so pretty.

Summer in the city often made me feel that I was missing out if I wasn’t surrounded by a swarm of friends. I’m not sure what it is about sunny days but it seems suddenly everyone belongs to a friend group of at least twelve. A solo evening wander by the harbour would leave me feeling that I needed to quickly find a group to drink with upon King Street or down at Wapping Wharf, looking out at the glistening harbour - for sitting alone with a book felt suddenly altogether very dull.

Now, a Friday night in July, I’m foraging on my own for some flowers and leaves among the rustling foliage for a homemade tea which I’ll no doubt enjoy while reading a book - or knitting! I almost giggle at myself. Truly embracing ‘local forest witch who lives in a cabin and knits her own shawl’ vibes. Acknowledging that these versions of me can co-exist. That I don’t need to fully devote myself to ‘woodland fairy who goes for early morning cold water swims’, but can too be the person who ‘enjoys a pub crawl and a night finished with a kebab shop pizza’.

iii

As I try to thread together my thoughts for this newsletter and reflect upon July, I find myself struggling to capture this month in all of its duality. Days filled with so much activity and never enough sleep - packing the endless daylight hours, even when they’re blanketed by rain. Yet, it’s been a month also shrouded with a sadness that required to be felt. A loss of someone far too soon from this earth. Piecing together how one moment can be filled with swimming - walking back salty and goosebumped - then speared with the knowledge of lives forever changed. That a life can be gone and we didn’t feel the ground shake, and the sky didn’t crack with thunder, and the birds didn’t fall from the sky, but still - lives are forever changed.

‘Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’ – Joan Didion in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking 

iv

Grief has long wobbled around the edges of my life, weightier at times - the death of a loved one you’d anticipated for weeks - and at other times a seeping, unexpected sorrow - perhaps the passing of a neighbour you’d only ever nodded hello’s to as you passed in the street. The core of these losses topples one another over at times.

“I think it’s something I will always carry with me,” one of my friends said to me as we spoke of his passing. The three of us sat on a park bench in Glasgow after arranging to meet, taking long journeys to one another for the day, the importance of our trio gathering more significant than ever.

I tell her I’ve been circling the loss over and over in my mind. That it’s something we can’t make sense of. How I’ve been learning that grief doesn’t retract because of degrees of separation or how long since you last saw them, but demands attention as it pushes you over in waves - tide times you can’t predict.

v

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began–
I loved my friend.

- Langston Hughes

You never stop missing someone. I think that’s the hardest thing I’ve come to know about grief. You’ll always miss them. That maybe it won’t be so all-consuming as time passes, but the hole will always be there. The place at the table they would’ve sat. The space in the world you simply knew they’d always exist within. That as each day since passes you may feel a kind of seasickness. As the shore disappears further into the distance, how terrifying it is to know that as each moment passes you are further from the person you knew on solid land.

Each new memory becomes a memory without.

A summer without. A Christmas without. The apple pie she would’ve made, no more. The spaces in conversation he would’ve cracked a joke. The gap in the family pictures. The news you’d share with them. The film that just came out in the cinema you know they’d have loved.

When there’s a date to anticipate - a time, a moment; a funeral to attend, to plan, to focus on - the force towards it propels you forward. But post it, after it, you’re being pulled along without. You’ve reached the end of the conveyor belt and you’re stuck rolling like a loose tomato until the cashier picks you up and weighs and scans you.

vi

I consider the arrival of August once more.

She has always shown up for me like the peak of a hike - you’ve reached the viewpoint and as you soak it all in, you’re left to make your way back down before dark. Summer is slipping - not quite gone, but the anticipation for the longer, sunnier days has certainly left us. The leaves will turn. The days will grow shorter. Time will keep moving, with and without.

This last month we had a barbecue outside the caravan - we’ve had a few. Chairs from inside the caravans came out and happy faces drank beers and wine from mismatched glasses. Fresh mackerel just caught from the loch, gutted and straight onto the barbeque and soon into our hungry, grinning mouths. I think that maybe life is simply these moments, placed like Jenga upon one another. That we can’t control the ones that knock us over or those that push us upwards, taller. But that the richness is found in the times we share, those where we bask in all that it is to be, to exist.

That a life well lived is a life full of feeling - the bad and the beautiful, the wonderful and the awful. 

vii

I hope you’re not spiralling into existential worry with this newsletter(!). I don’t mean to weigh you down with these thoughts. I write to understand - or, to make clear what I don’t understand. But, I hope rather than causing you worry, this encourages you to pause and look at the treasures of this life that we are lucky enough to live. That we have been able to feel all these things. From our first wobbly tooth that we worried with our tongue to the burning sensation on the roof of our mouth when we can’t quite wait to take that first bite of a piping hot meal.

None of us can explain how or why the universe blossoms between two people. That a connection can form in the heartbeat of time and space. Why missing that job opportunity lead to meeting someone great. I can’t tell you how different your life may or may not look if you’d grown up in a different town. Where you’d be if that person were still here.

But I can know one thing.

That time’s passing can be awful all while being wonderful. That we can wish time would hurry up - our impatience for the future palpable to her unwavering progression - and in the same breath we can grip onto time’s tail as we beg her to stop moving so quickly, to stop dragging us further away.

viii

July’s air-punch of barbeques and wild swims, adventures through forests and mornings making waffles, was as joyous as it was sorrowful. While many of these summer days ended with a feeling I remember strongly from childhood - that happy heaviness - others ended without a full breath.

In the rain of July - the thunderous crescendo upon the roof followed by that sudden stillness when the sky breaks, pinpricked with sunlight - I notice one truth. That we can stand in the forest and feel the rain drop down onto our soggy heads and we can find ourselves smiling. That we can hold both sorrow and joy within our hands. Observe a ripped paper bag of lemons spilling out onto the table.

TO READ: This perfect poem that gives me all the good-feelings of July.

TO LISTEN: I made another little Spotify playlist for this newsletter! It’s all those July-y, summery-winding-down feelings.

TO FOLLOW: I’ve been seriously loving @urfromhere on Instagram, a page by a beautiful filmmaker exploring our connection to nature, featuring lots of fantastic thoughts and ideas, alongside foraging advice!

Once again, thank you for spending this time with me and indulging me in my brain’s wanderings. I hope it’s been one that leaves you looking softly at the beauty of everyday life, and encouraged you to continue to show your love for the people around you.

Continue to be kind, to yourself and to others.

I’ll be in your inbox again on the first Sunday of the month with more musings.