What Summer Leaves Behind

The first unkind week

People talk about summer as if it were a switch. In Round Rock it is more like a rumor that turns out to have been true all along. One week the evenings still have a little mercy. The next, the patio holds heat after dark the way a pan holds it, and the grass takes on that slightly stunned expression I associate with being asked to perform without water or applause. I walk outside after dinner and feel, immediately, that I have mis-scheduled my life. The day is not over. The day is sitting on the lawn, waiting to see what I will pretend not to notice.

What summer leaves behind, even this early, is a record of exposure. The fence line paler. The oak’s shade more valuable, which is a ridiculous thing to say about shade and also accurate. Leaves that fell in a less theatrical season collect in the corner by the shed and become a kind of sediment. I keep meaning to move them. I keep walking past them with the expertise of a person who can live beside evidence.

The smell changes. Cut grass, when someone on the street still has the energy, is sweeter and shorter-lived. Dry soil smells like a warning. After a brief rain the ground steams faintly, and for twenty minutes the yard smells like a childhood I cannot place on a map. Then the heat returns and files the moment under weather.

I have a theory, which I do not trust, that summer is when a neighborhood reveals its maintenance philosophy. Some lawns go militant. Some go philosophical, which is a kind word for brown. Mine hovers in the anxious middle, watered enough to look like effort and neglected enough to look like a person who has other things, or claims to.

What survives, and what only looks like surviving

The weeds are having a better season than I am. They treat heat as a filter that removes the competition. I pull them in the cooler hour, which is a relative term, and feel the small satisfaction of a task with an edge. Then I stand up and the rest of the yard is still there, larger than my handful of green. This is the ratio of most of my outdoor work: a visible gesture, an unchanged field.

The dry patch near the fence, which I have already written about as if it were a relative, becomes more itself. I have stopped hoping it will join the team. I water it anyway, because hope and habit are difficult to tell apart when you are holding a hose. Water darkens the dirt. Ants relocate with an indignation I find relatable. By the next afternoon the pale has returned, slightly more convinced.

Cicadas, or whatever is producing that particular metallic shimmer in the trees, make the hours feel thicker. I used to find the sound purely nostalgic. Now it is also a clock. It says: you are in the long part. The long part of summer is where plans go to become weather. I had a list in April. The list has not died. It has merely been placed in a drawer labeled when it is not like this.

It is like this. That is the sentence summer keeps leaving on the counter. I can fight it with timers and early mornings, and I do. I can also notice that fighting is not the only available relationship to a season. There is a quieter one that looks, from the street, like letting the edges brown a little. I am not sure yet which one is honesty and which one is fatigue wearing honesty’s shirt.

Residue

What I mean by residue is not only the physical leftover: seed heads, a faded hose, the line of clippings that never quite made it into the bag. I mean the emotional leftover, which is less photogenic. A slight grief for the easy green of March, even though March had its own complaints. A slight embarrassment that I still expect the year to remain at the temperature I prefer. A slight tenderness, unexpected, for the oak that keeps making shade as if shade were a civic duty.

Memory attaches itself to this residue with very little invitation. A certain quality of late light on the fence and I am not only here; I am also in some earlier summer, standing in some earlier yard, waiting to be called in. I do not reconstruct the scene. I just get the weather of it. Then a distant mower starts, or a sprinkler, and I am returned to this address, this year, this particular unfinished corner.

I used to want summer to be a story of abundance. It can be. It is also a story of limits. The grass shows the limit first, which is useful if you are trying to learn how to live inside a climate instead of arguing with it. I am still arguing, some days. Other days I take my coffee to the shaded strip and let the heat happen without my commentary. The commentary comes later, on the page, which is a cooler room and therefore a dishonest one. I try to write while the air is still on my skin.

Tonight the patio is warm under my heel. The sky is doing that long Texas evening that pretends it will never end and then ends all at once. What summer has left so far is not ruin. It is a more accurate inventory: which parts of the yard were luxury, which parts were luck, which parts were always going to need more from me than I like to give. I can live with an inventory. I have lived too long with a brochure.

Tomorrow will be hotter, or it will rain and the weeds will throw a party. Either way the residue will thicken. I am keeping this journal so that when September finally arrives, looking like forgiveness, I will remember that the heat was not an interruption of my life here. It was the main plot, and the yard, in its imperfect green, was taking notes even when I was indoors, convinced that nothing important could happen at this temperature.