Tipping Point

 

Tiny blueberries,

handpicked, lie in small boxes

like orbs of lapis

"Summer," for me, always arrives around July 1, announced by the blooming of the ubiquitous roadside orange daylilies and spires of (fuschia-colored) purple loosestrife. The more delicate June flowers that thrive in showers and coolness quickly fade and give way to these robust, and (to me, anyway) coarser plants, able to withstand long days of sustained heat and battering thunderstorms.

Something in me gives way, too, when I first see them blooming. Just when summer finally arrives here in the north, with our two warmest months still ahead of us, I know that actually the sun has paid his visit and is already packing up and starting the journey south. We wait so long for heat, and I, especially, time the passage of the seasons by this natural calendar of anticipation and succession: the fleeting bloom of trillium and hepatica followed by lily-of-the-valley, poppy, peony, rose, delphinium; the arrival of robins and butterflies, all that meeting and mating and nesting followed inevitably by the gradual toughening of tender leaves and stems, by the fracturing of egg and chrysalis, by eventual departure.

Am I like that too? I asked myself, walking home the other day. Has my life followed a trajectory of tender, idealistic anticipation that gradually ceded to maturity, realism, and an accompanying toughening against the vicissitudes and difficulties, against the knowledge of what's to come?

There's truth to that, I decided, but only so far as I allow myself to be trapped by my own biology; tenderness can persist forever if I carry it inside me, and ripening continues right up to the fall of the fruit.