“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” —Henry James
Greetings, writers—
Oh, summer! In no other season am I so happy and so full of dread. I want to hold on to the days, want to slow time’s passage, but the hours and weeks fly mercilessly by; schedules go out the window we’ve left open for the breeze. Family dinner, what’s that? Fend for yourselves, teens! Aren’t there plums on the tree and green tomatoes in the garden? Isn’t Fred Meyer an eight-minute walk away?
I spend my days writing and either swimming or obsessing about swimming. We’re just back from Orcas Island, where I lived in Cascade Lake for a week, and now I’m sitting on the banks of the Clackamas River, into which I will wade the minute I finish writing this post. Yesterday, in between reading about forensic pathology (research) and writing about a housekeeper discovering a dead body in a fancy apartment, I watched swifts performing their bug-hunting acrobatics above the jade-green water. Right now I can see a turkey vulture perched on a snag by the rapids; earlier there was an osprey in the exact same spot.
I like clean, clear water best, of course, but I’ll take pretty much anything without an active algae bloom. For the summer issue of Portland Monthly, I wrote about my affection for the river running through the middle of our city:
The first I jumped into the Willamette River, I thought I was breaking the rules. It was August 2016, and a friend from LA and I were halfway through a five-mile run and feeling barbecued by sunlight. As we passed the massive, cetaceous hump of OMSI’s Blueback submarine, my friend turned to me and said, “What if we just went for a swim?”
Such a simple question, and yet an authentic head-spinner. No one I knew swam in the downtown Willamette. For as long as I’d lived in Portland, I’d thought of the river—if I thought of it at all—as a long, cold, wet thing dividing one side of the city from the other.
But I wanted to be a good host, and so, faking confidence (and fully intending to tell any authorities that I, too, was from out of town), I led the way down to the dock. We took off our footwear; I ginned up my nerves. Then we counted to three and flung ourselves into the water, passing from hot, bright dryness into its perfect opposite in a mere instant. We came up spluttering, whooping, thrilled.
I really thought we’d get a ticket when we got out. An epidermal reaction to the somewhat murky water didn’t seem impossible, either. But I was wrong about both of these things, and I do not exaggerate when I say that realizing this changed my life.
You can read the rest of it here if you’re so inclined.
Today, write a scene of summer, or water.
Yours,
Emily
