July — The Long, Still Days of Summer

I am not a summer person. But I have learned not to wish the days away.

As you know, I am not a summer person. I love fall and winter. I love the cool crisp mornings and evenings of fall, the vibrant colors and everything that comes with it, pumpkin spice included. I love winter. I love the cold mornings and the early dark and the particular quality of January light through bare trees and the feeling of being snowed in with a good book and nowhere to be. I love plaid and cashmere and fires in the evening and the whole long, beautiful slowness of the cold months.

July is not that.

But here is what many summers have taught me about seasons you do not naturally love. You do not have to pretend to love them. You do not have to perform enthusiasm you do not feel. But you also cannot wish them away. Time does not work like that. Every July I do not fully inhabit is a July I will not get back, and I am old enough now to know that the calendar moves faster than it used to.

So I have made my peace with summer. Not by pretending it is October, but by finding the things in it that are worth finding and holding on to those.

This is what July looks like from where I am.

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What I Am Looking Forward To in July

The pool and the beach club four or five days a week. This is the rhythm of summer for us and I have grown to need it more than I expected to. The water is cold and the sun is hot and there is something about floating in the middle of a summer afternoon, eyes closed, the sounds of the world going quiet, that resets me in a way I cannot quite name. The pool does for me in July what a long walk with Patches does in October.

Speaking of Patches, our afternoon sniffer walks continue in July, though we time them more carefully. Early morning or evening when the pavement has cooled. This is her favorite time of the day. In fact the minute I put my shoes on in the morning she is at my feet whining for a walk or an adventure. She would prefer to investigate every pinecone and piece of pine straw. We do not let her. We compromise: a shorter route at a cooler hour, with all the deliberate sniffing her small heart desires.

The peonies are finished. They disappeared in May, sadly. It catches me slightly off guard every year, the way the blooms go so quickly, and then one morning you go out and the garden has moved on without them. Then came the gardenias, but they only lasted a week before they turned brown. It is a small grief, the kind that comes back every year and passes just as reliably. By August I have stopped looking for them. By April I will be waiting again.

The Indigo Room is where I spend more time than usual in July. In the heat of summer there is something calm and cool in its dimness. I go there in the afternoons with a book and a cold glass of something and the dogs find their places around me and for an hour or two the heat outside becomes irrelevant. Every home should have one room like this, one room that just holds you. In July, mine earns its keep twice over. Not to mention the show from the windows. I can see the birds in the nest above the wreath and I can watch the circle come to life, the bee balm  and the salvia and the coneflowers all nodding in whatever breeze there is, and the birds lined up along the bath waiting their turn.

In the evenings, Bill is at the grill. This is one of the reliable pleasures of summer that I do not take for granted. The smell of something good cooking outdoors while the light finally begins to soften, the day cooling off, and a glass of sangria or a blush lily in my hand. It is not complicated. It does not require planning. It is just an ordinary summer evening and it takes me back to my childhood, minus the cocktail. 

And of course, this is the year. America turns 250 on the Fourth of July and there is something about it that makes you want to celebrate it a little differently than years past. We will have a house full of guests, which is my favorite kind of July chaos, the kind where the kitchen never fully closes and there are always more towels to wash. There will be pool parties and cookouts and Bill at the grill feeding everyone who walks through the door. And there will be fireworks. I do not know what it is about fireworks that still gets me every single time, but it does. Something about standing outside in the dark with the people you love, all of you looking up at the same sky. Fireworks always take me back to Lake Michigan, to all those summer nights watching the sky light up over the water with my grandmother, my mother, my siblings. That is what the Fourth of July is, really. It is the people you were with and the sky you were under and the way the memory holds all of it together long after the last spark has gone out.

On The Blog This Month

The Menopause Saga continues this month with the next installment. If you have been following along you know this series is close to my heart. Nobody sent the handout and I am writing the one I wish someone had handed me years ago. If you have not started from the beginning, Post Zero is here and post one is here. Please read them, share them, send it to every woman you know.

Cindy and I will be sharing our first Seasonal Table post, we are sharing watermelon salads! Then Sheri and I will be posting no-bake treats to beat the heat. Aside from that, there will be a few other recipes and of course the usual Monday Musings, Friday Favorites, Weekend Meanderings and longer posts about subjects that I am thinking about in mid-life. Come back often this month. There will be something here for you.

What I Am Wearing This Month

July is the month I surrender to linen and anything that does not stick to me by ten in the morning. Dresses, always dresses. A cotton caftan for the pool, a midi dress for dinner, a plaid dress on a Sunday, flat sandals or bare feet wherever I can get away with it. The plaid does not disappear entirely, it never does, but it gets lighter. Simple jewelry, silver or enamel bracelets stacked, nothing fussy. July is not a month for trying hard. It is a month for looking like yourself and being comfortable doing it. You can see all of my summer picks on ShopMy.

What To Cook This Month

Summer is Bill’s season at the grill. I am there for the burgers, the chicken, the pulled pork, the ribs. He is also the one making steaks and fish when we have family and friends over, which in July is often. I handle the baking, the salads, the sides. He handles the heat. This is a division of labor that has served us well for over thirty years and I see no reason to revisit it.

In between, I will share whatever I get up to in the kitchen, which in July tends to be cold things, bright things, and anything that does not require turning on the oven. Although let’s be honest, if the recipe is good enough, it is never too hot to turn on the oven.

What To Read This Month

Reading in July is a different thing than reading in January. I want to be somewhere else entirely, somewhere with cool stone floors and long windows and the sound of a different language outside. Something set in England or Scotland or the French countryside, where the summer light falls differently and the air is nothing like the air here in July.

This month I am reaching for two books that do exactly that.

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. A bookseller lives on a floating bookshop on the Seine and spends his days prescribing novels the way a doctor prescribes medicine, matching the right book to whatever ails you. If you love books about books and France in equal measure, this is yours.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. Four very different English women, all of them tired in their own way, rent a medieval castle on the Italian coast for the month of April. What happens next is not dramatic. It is quieter than that. They stop performing their own exhaustion. They remember who they are. It was written in 1922 and it has not aged a day. Read it on the porch with a glass of sweet tea or fresh squeezed lemonade. 

If you are looking for something else, a book that will take you somewhere far away for a few hours, tell me in the comments what you love and I will see what I can find for you. And if you want to know more about how I read and what I read and why books are the nearest thing I have to a year-round travel companion, that cornerstone post is here.

What I Am Thinking About This Month

July always makes me think about time. Specifically about not wishing it away.

It starts around now, every year. Christmas in July sales show up in my feed. The shops start hinting at fall. And somewhere between a red and green email subject line and a display of pumpkins in the middle of June, I catch myself thinking: already? We are not even through this season and the next one is already being sold to us.

I spent a lot of years being the person who said I cannot wait for fall. August was just September waiting to happen. July was something to get through. And I understand that impulse, I share it, if I am honest, but I have come to see it as a kind of ingratitude toward the hours I actually have.

The women I admire most right now are not the ones who are always anticipating the next season, the next occasion, the next thing. They are the ones who are fully present in the one they are in. Who find the beauty in July even when July is not their favorite. Who sit by the pool on a hot Tuesday afternoon and think: this is good, right now, exactly as it is.

I am working on being that woman. I am not there yet entirely. But July by July, I am getting closer.

July is long and hot and not always easy if, like me, you are constitutionally better suited to November. But it is also the sound of the pool on a Tuesday afternoon. It is Patches investigating a particularly interesting pinecone in the cool of the evening. It is Bill at the grill and a pitcher of sangria on the table and the light finally going golden at eight o’clock and the day releasing its hold.

It is, in its own way, beautiful. I am trying to see it that way, for as many Julys as I have left.

Tell me in the comments, are you a summer person? And if not, what is it that you love about it anyway?

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