The various trials of this year have shifted me toward some better ways of being, and I live more in the moment than ever before. (Which is not to say that I do it well, but more often and more consciously.) So I resolved, as I have every year since we moved here, to embrace the summerness—the sunlight that lasts from 5 am to 10 pm, the warmth, and the green. Beer and lakes and ice cream and Farmer’s markets and long stretches of time for reading and writing. No teaching, lots of honey time.

And I did very well with this for the six weeks that we were more or less on the road. We’ve been back for ten days now. We’ve restocked the fridge, put our lives sort of back in motion. I’ve been working on chapter revisions and did a guest lecture last night. Dear colleagues are leaving and people who may become dear appear in their stead. My mother-in-law lingers in a bed in a border town. My friends prepare for babies. Life is happening all around. I wish for a garden, for more pantry room so that I could can things and try to preserve something, just for a little while. I stand still and do my best to soak it all up, both the blessings and the awfulness, and remember to breathe.

But as I was driving by the campus trial fields, full of corn that is indeed knee-high-by-the-fourth-of-July, the thought came, completely unbidden: I’m ready for fall. I pushed it back, pressed it into a corner, squashed it flat. A few days later the August Vanity Fair came in the mail and out sprung the ads for fall tweeds, for coats, for bright leaves and gloomy skies, and my heart skipped just a bit, just enough to let me know that in spite of my best efforts I will never really love summer. I can embrace it, but I never relax into it the way I do the autumn. There is never enough time — and I know enough now not to hurry it — but when the air changes and the leaves aren’t far behind, I won’t think that the seasons have shifted too soon.