Short Respite

I’m writing this on a Tuesday after work, and if I’m counting right, we’re on day 14 of a stretch of sunny days. For the record, this does not happen here in this part of Alaska. We have occasional sunny breaks from a rainy stint, but we don’t have this shade-seeking, sunhat-wearing, cold drink-drinking kind of weather after the middle of August. This late season unexpected bit of wonder is more than I could have hoped for, and my heart is near bursting with gratitude.

Our summer company has gone home for the season and things are slowing down around here. It gets dark before 10:00 p.m. nowadays, so we have an excuse to settle down a bit in the evenings. Last night before going to bed I stood in the yard and looked up at the sky for a while. It’s unusual to have non-freezing temperatures for stargazing.

Knowing so much is wrong with our world makes this moment right here, right now, feel impossibly perfect. These are simple pleasures I’m experiencing—cool grass under the blanket I’m sitting on, a cup of fresh-picked strawberries beside me—but I’d be a fool not to acknowledge the good luck that has brought me to this moment.

Right now there is hardly a breeze. Right here the low angle light is shining from the west across the meadow below our house and it’s illuminating the last of the summer’s insects as they do their slow hovering dance with the fireweed cotton. The birch and cottonwood trees are tipped in gold and against the blue of the sky and the green of our lawn and the orange of the nasturtiums, I cannot make sense of how the world can be so devastating and so wonderful at the same time.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t have a lesson or a moral or call to action. I’m just wishing I could share this. Wishing everyone could taste the tomatoes in our greenhouse that have been granted a couple extra weeks of sunshine for ripening. Wishing everyone could sit here and watch the boats skiff across the bay toward the harbor. Wishing I could wrap everyone in this blanket of how I feel right now and let them rest here for a while.