This summer is rather hard to love. A blanket of cloud of varying colour and density keeps the sun from warming and brightening our days almost every day. Just occasionally, the cloud disperses, the sun shines and the air begins to warm, we sit ourselves outside, apply sun cream, remember what we thought summer was originally intended to mean. These occasions last sometimes more than half a day...
My mother used to struggle with the way weather affected her mood, and be vociferously indignant when it was ghastly! Lowering (pronounced louring) was a word she often used to describe just such skies as we have seen rather too much of this summer. Definitions include dark and threatening, and I think it was some kind of threat that my mother used to sense, or you might say project into these heavy dull skies. And I have become more like her as I have grown older, even as I have deepened my understanding of the early roots of the feeling that is triggered. For me the departure of brightness, the absence of the sun and its warmth, create a perfect sensory metaphor for abandonment, loss, separation, ending. The mood that can seize me - a depressive one, if you will - is one in which all goodness has departed, the best is past, and now only bleakness and doom remain. I try to think of it as theatre lighting, to consider the skill used by its technicians to create mood and meaning by adjustments to the angle, brightness, colour or tint of the onstage lighting. I try to find the place inside me where I feel well, supported and know that I have not been abandoned. Hard work.
Today I have taken garden waste, cardboard and empty cartons to the tip, been to Lidl to buy amongst other things 70% dark chocolate with small caramel chips in it, goats cheese, nectarines and a little basket of single clove garlic. I learned that they do not sell fresh ginger. So I bought some from The Bear, a rather fine wholefood shop nearby, as well as some ground ginger, some fine wholewheat flour and some blackcurrant and apple concentrate. Sliced fresh ginger infused in boiling water is my favourite afternoon beverage and very good for the digestion. Good news to report, since we're on the subject - my gut doing very much better and I think I've put on a pound or so! Certainly eating a whole lot more these last few weeks, and able to enjoy the raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries we have been growing in abundance in garden and allotment. We made ten jars of gooseberry jam at the weekend!
So, yes, summer is still performing some of its expected miracles!
2 comments:
Good news for me would NOT be that I'd put on a pound or two. However, I'm delighted that things are fairly positive for you, apart from the weather, of course...
Sounds to me as if you've talked yourself into loving the summer anyway by the end of the post!
Odd, 'lowering', though pronounced 'louring', also carries a sense of lowering to the spirits. Though really dismal cold wet summers are intolerable, I find I'm not bothered about mixed ones without relentless heat and sunshine; this one's been rather nice here, though we could do with some proper rain now and less mere threatening of it. Having Molly altered things a bit, a cooler summer meant a more comfortable dog and more possibilities of going places with her. Also, since having the luxury of distancing myself from the school year, which only allows summer to consist of the tired dog end of a scrap of July and dreary August (which can often provoke the kind of moods you describe), means one can appreciate the season as and when it shows up, whether in the glory days of May or lovely golden Indian ones in September or October.
Glad to hear you have been enjoying Lidl's bounty anyway!
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