It wasn’t until August that this summer hit her stride, swooning in armfuls of ripe peaches, glisteningly taut tomatoes, and baskets brimming with raspberries. The bruised violet skin of the neighbor’s gossamer black figs, ripe to bursting and melting tenderly against our tongues like the lips of a late-summer lover (who will be gone like a fever dream come morning). In reality, the plastic crate of figs was left overnight on the wooden kitchen table, literally oozing so that in the morning, after swishing away the slow-motion swarms of fruitflies, wiping the gooey surface, and hastily tossing several piles of figs ripened to bursting pulp into the bin, a geometric purple stain of the crate’s contours clung to the table. Where it now remains, a cruel reminder of loss: the ghost of summer’s most tender bounty.
August finally yielded what only a Texan might assume a south-of-France summer should promise, but rarely delivers. The sun poured down like honey for weeks, sweetening the views of green-breasted woodpeckers patrolling our long driveway, roe deer glancing furtively up towards the walled garden like children trespassing from the thistle-overrun cow fields below. After such an intermittently cool and wet summer, the emergent warm spell meant strawberries blushed anew and the zinnias at last came into their own. For a blissful minute, it felt like it just might last forever.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. On the first day of Charlie’s school, the much-anticipated rentrée, summer turned off as abruptly as if someone had hit a switch, and it’s been mostly chilly and raining ever since.
I mentioned to some of my French parent counterparts that “Je suis triste pour le fin de l’été,” and saw a couple of wry smiles. One friend remarked, “Vraiment, triste?” Today, our French tutor explained the nuance of French, giving a long list of adjectives to describe “unhappy” that are more appropriate than “triste,” which he articulated with a flourish of his hand and a statement that, “when your child dies, it is triste, but not when your car is totaled.” I laughed until I gasped for breath, imagining how absurdly melodramatic I must seem, the silly American wringing her hands in despair because summer had ended and the final tomato harvest was nigh.
In truth, I am a glutton for long, languorous days and their adjacent sweat-stained T-shirts and mosquito-bitten ankles. A balmy night is more romantic to me than any other scenario. And nothing compares to stargazing on a new moon night, counting meteors to a symphony of cricket bows. My heart always yearns for an “Indian Summer,” a turn of phrase I took to be uniquely American until my British Husband claimed it was in common use in the UK. Some gentle probing reveals a term that has shape-shifted in and out of its own skin, at times suggesting depletion and a lack of fertility and at others a return to the rosy days of youth. It seems to have originated in North America, likely when the phenomenon was described to settlers by Native Americans in the 1700s, before traveling back to the Olde World on the pages of a letter in French. By the 20th century, it had entered the British lexicon, eventually replacing "Saint Martin's summer" which had been previously used across Europe to describe the warm autumn weather sometimes swaddling the feast days of St. Martin and Saint Luke.
Ecclesiastic weather names are woven into our lexical histories, with warm spells in October associated with Teresa of Ávila1 (Portugal, Spain, and France), or in November, St. Martin's Summer (Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and Malta), St. Michael's summer (Veranillo de San Miguel in Spain, Miholjsko leto, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina), St. Martin's Day (Netherlands and Italy), St. Demetrius (Greece and Cyprus), and so many more. Even more interesting is the term meaning old women's summer (Altweibersommer) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lithuania, Hungary, etc. And then the Slavic countries with their variations of the same “old women's summer" (Czech: babí léto, Ukrainian: бабине літо, Polish: babie lato, Slovak: babie leto, Russian: бабье лето. Why old women? Was it because it is a spell of gentleness? Weakness? Because it harkens to a season past like a wizened face recalling itself once smooth, seemingly not so long ago?
I can only say that among all these pet names for an unseasonally warm spell softening the chill of autumn, my favorite is the Irish, fómhar beag na ngéanna, which translates to “little autumn of the geese.” Who knows where it comes from or why, but in my mind, I see a clutch of jovial waterfowl, carving pumpkins with their mean little beaks and honking joyously before a bonfire. Never mind that it probably has more to do with geese as a culinary mainstay of the season.
The last term that tickles me is one from Spain, el veranillo del membrillo, or "little summer of the quince tree," which anyone who has ever observed the brilliant canary yellow of the quince fruits clinging to branches on a day with gray skies will understand. A few dozen little suns, promising a final burst of sweetness to see you through the winter if boiled into a sugary paste properly. My last membrillo paste was overcooked into inedible candy, so perhaps not in my case.
Can you imagine living in a time when there was no weather app, no weather channel, not even a Farmer’s Almanac in general circulation to help guide one’s activity from one day, week, month, or season to the next? I like to think of the wise natives, observing the heavily furred fox moth caterpillars or early migrations of birds moving south and foretelling a harsh winter to come. Years of living treacherously close to the land (have I ever told you about living in a yurt in central Texas for 5 years?) have given me a sliver of this innate sense of meteorological premonition, but comparatively weak and unreliable. In middle age, the flickering edge of a threatening migraine is often my weathervane, warning that a front is approaching. As if the black line of clouds wasn’t obvious enough a sign.
Despite a love of all warm weather, I wring my hands almost annually when an unseasonably warm spell descends in January or February just as the apricot and plum trees have erupted into a (doomed) flush of blooms. I always assume this is the consequence of living on a warming and unpredictable planet, but it seems that this phenomenon is not new at all and has been sometimes referred to as “halcyon days” which I know comes from Greek mythos but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t immediately send me directly here, mentally:
These halcyon days manifest in up to a week of unusually warm and sunny days in the last weeks of January. Finally, good old Shakespeare himself was known to use "All-Hallown Summer" or "All Saints' Summer" for these inexplicably pleasant winter moments, and I may make it my personal crusade to revive their use.
Alas, outside it is pissing down rain, and this entry has taken me a week to complete—this is not a testament to its excellence but rather an admission of guilt, that I am currently something of a servant to the waning season, spending most of my waking hours in the kitchen. The harvest demands process—pressing and grinding, fermenting and curing. Salting, sugaring, boiling and freezing. This sunshine will melt on our tongues for the next 9 months or more.
Today, after a trampoline workout, I came home, driving past a succession of sorghum fields (a rotational crop I’d not seen in almost 6 years here) and immediately pasteurized 6 liters of grape juice from our vines, made a couple gallons of apple butter from our scant, worm-infested apple crop, accidentally set off a hot grape juice geyser that plastered the kitchen ceiling with molten, pressurized juice (somehow only burning a tiny spot on my wrist), wrangled even more ripe tomatoes, and for some reason decided it was a good evening to make an incredibly labor intensive moussaka. Friends, I am tired.
The season is spent, and for the first time, I am experiencing something akin to relief. There is a quiet recognition that these shortening days spell out a sort of dread for me, having endured a long, wrenching grief avalanche in recent years that commenced with the seasons shifting. At a friend’s suggestion, I am concocting a ritual to act as a balm, something to stitch the summer’s end to autumn’s beginning in a joyful way that connects me to the season in a loving, fearless way.
It is a strange thing, in middle age, to recognize one’s self not as Persephone, but as Demeter. And to be, in more ways than can be counted, grateful for it.
Lighter thoughts and recipes coming soon. For now, I am trying a new thing—going to bed “early,” which mostly means not too long after midnight. My aging bones thank me in the morning.
Bisous!
Saint Teresa’s poor, sanctified body simply would NOT be left alone, and various bits of her, relics, (arm, hand, fingers, foot, EYE, jawbone, etc) are entombed in Catholic churches and museums around southern Europe. The venerable dictator Francisco Franco—yes THAT one—was said to have kept one of her eyes until his death. Anyway, it appears that some of the faithful won’t even let women rest when they’re dead.
So wonderful. Standing ovation! Oh my goodness what an adventure I had. I thought I was there. And the photos! Sustained ovation. Thank you for finding time to write. I am always better for having read your delicious offerings.