At Summer's End

Remembering Summer

W.S. Merwin

Being too warm the old lady said to me
is better than being too cold I think now
in between is the best because you never
give it a thought but it goes by too fast
I remember the winter how cold it got
I could never get warm wherever I was
but I don't remember the summer heat like that
only the long days the breathing of the trees
the evenings with the hens still talking in the lane
and the light getting longer in the valley
the sound of a bell from down there somewhere
I can sit here now still listening to it.

I can't begin to describe how I feel reading this poem, how I felt when I first read this poem, how it seemed to appear out of nowhere in this moment, the winding down of summer, when I so desperately sought to describe (and remember) how this feels, how summer felt. Wham, there it is this poem, this Merwin poem nonetheless - one I've never seen before and didn't know I so desperately needed.

"The breathing of the trees" just gets me every time. Actually all of that description toward the end of the poem which seems to just perfectly encapsulate summer afternoons - the ease, the light unlike any other time, the vague sounds that seem to arrive dreamily, the nostalgia attached to it all.

I'm going to need this poem come February. I need it now. I love it.

Getting Unstuck

For years (12!!!), I've loved writing in this blog, capturing the seemingly unconnected connections between Merwin the dog and Merwin the poet, musing on this or that, posting Merry Merwins and now Jolly Ollies, sharing poems that resonated in one way or another, and using this practice as a method of creating something, a feeling I have always craved. 

In early 2022, I bought a new laptop, and posting on the blog became much trickier. Spacing was off, formatting was complicated and sticky, and all the procedures I had gotten down so well over the years seemed broken. Most difficult, posts kept defaulting to double spacing, which was incredibly prohibitive, especially when posting poems. It was a huge obstacle that I spent hours trying to solve. Alas, the complications just became too icky for me to navigate. I stopped writing.

I thought about how much I missed it every now and then and even came back to the site a few times to give it another go. But the formatting challenges were just too frustrating for this Type A selective perfectionist.

Now, literally years later, I realized one simple reason why everything was funky. One itty bitty thing that caused it all to go awry and led me to abandon this practice and place I had really loved.

For some reason, in a few different programs and on some websites, this Mac's "return" key forces double spacing. It was driving me batty yesterday when working on a client project and something made me try holding down the shift key while tapping return.

Lo and behold. Single spacing. It took me a good 12 hours to connect this discovery back to the blog's issues. All those years, all that agony, all those tiny little seeds of ideas for posts that are now nothingness, all those moments I could've found joy in crafting posts, rediscovering poems, savoring that feeling of making something, however small or insignificant. Gone.

In a time of my life where I have increasingly felt "stuck," whether stuck in inactivity as body part after body part seems to cooperate less and less often or stuck in a cyclical maelstrom of varying emotions and mental well-being, being so stuck with the blog for such an asinine reason just feels....wild. 

On the flip side, I am grateful that even though it took an age and a lot was lost, it's resolved. Forward we go into more Jolly Ollies and soap box tirades. Of course, now blogs are likely relics like rotary phones, but I'm glad to have this space back, whatever ridiculousness it took to get here.

There's likely a lesson here about "being stuck." A lesson about shifting a small thing to get unstuck, a lesson in just trying something to create that inertia to change. Maybe it's about realizing that just because you made your bed, you actually don't have to sleep in it the way it is. You can get new sheets, add a mattress topper, invest in a great pillow if that means getting you one step closer to a place you love. 

Or not. It could just be a lesson in learning how to use your damn laptop correctly.