Posts tagged "summer" - A Literal Girl

Jun 21, 2009 0

Bath, Summer Solstice, 2009

I wake to a hot-air-balloon floating past the window. We have been here before: the Circus, the Royal Crescent–but I hardly recognize any of it. Only the glimmer of grey stone under half-sunlight sometimes, only the slope of a garden path. We spend the day walking in circles. The balloons going up all morning, all afternoon, all evening. It smells like jasmine dripping from the petals of wet English roses. And sometimes pizza, espresso, men soaked in ale, a woman’s sickly perfume (she must have bathed in it, showered with it, washed her hands with it, drunk it like tea for its fragrance to follow her so strongly). At lunch a surly Thai woman wishes, we’re sure, that we’d never entered her restuarant, gives the flimsiest smile I’ve ever seen at every customer. At the edge of night we walk to the park, where blue-and-white striped chairs, all empty, are having thier own party now that the loungers and the picnickers have fled the grassy banks. Empty chairs, and the bells ring out for the empty hour.

And now the curtains are drawn to block out the last, late vestiges of June light and the cricket is on the television, and the balloons, I think, have all come down to rest, and up the hill from us the circus and the royal crescent sleep.

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May 30, 2009 0

Between Spring and Summer

The days of late have been English-hot. We sit outside in the daytime and my dreams at night are infused with the images from other people’s stories. Climbers on snowy Oxford rooftops. A weather balloon in Padua. African pelicans. I wear my panama hat even indoors because it reaffirms the season. This is the hat I bought to go to Morocco, I say, because once it was just a ladies’ hat in Marks and Spencer but the second I laid eyes upon it, two years ago almost, it became part of the journey. A traveller’s portable shade.

Yesterday we fixed my bicycle, swept the entrance to the house, pulled weeds up, had an impromptu barbecue. In the jungle of knee-high, hip-high grass that’s blossomed in our garden, frogs leaped from blade to blade and the smoke dissapeared into the dusky blue. From the garden pathway, looking away from the house, towards the sun dipping, the trees heavy with their summer leaves, this might be anywhere. This might be miles away, no, worlds away from anywhere else. An island of green and smoke; a paradise for the dispossessed. Very Heart of Darkness, I say, only cheerier.

We still haven’t unpacked from Wales, though we’ve been back a week. As if it’s summer now, so that’s okay. Seasonal lethargy, the usual wanderlust of these months.

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Jul 24, 2008 0

Life in an English Heat Wave

It’s the summer of the ice cream van. Maybe I was oblivious last year but the ice cream van wasn’t around half as much as it is now. All day, every day: the inanity of the song, as it weaves in and out of our neighborhood streets. I can’t even hum it now; it’s just a constant backdrop.

“Oh, give it a rest, will you?” we say when we hear the tinkling notes from afar. We cringe as it comes nearer. But I don’t know if we really mind. It means that it’s summertime. I never see anyone buy ice cream from the van, but maybe, in a weird sort of way, we’re all just comforted by its presence.

It’s been hot here. Hot enough to hang laundry outside and have it dry alarmingly fast. While I’m hanging our shirts and trousers and undergarments I notice a cat who has curled up at the far end of the garden, next to the potato patch. He looks as if he’s guarding the vegetables; he stretches a paw, yawns, settles his head against the warm concrete.

At midday I open the window upstairs wide and stick my head out of it to get some fresh air. I like being able to peer down; sometimes, at night, when we hear strange things, we do the same thing. It’s amazing how much you can see when the street doesn’t think you’re watching.

I go for a run; I take a circuitous route that leads me to the top of South Park, where I find myself looking down at the spired skyline below. There’s a little haze hanging in the afternoon air, so that the spikes of Magdalen tower look soft. On the swing set, a pair of teenagers are pumping their legs furiously.

One of them, the boy, says, “I’m going to jump!” The girl giggles coyly, but when she sees he’s serious, she says, “Don’t do it, Will. It’s too high Will.” She has very short hair, a sort of 1920′s bob, and a striped t-shirt.

Her voice changes as he prepares to leap.

“Will NO! Will, I’m begging you, no!” She says. She implores him so earnestly I turn to watch; he pumps his legs one last time and propels himself from the seat of the swing. He is suspended; then he lands in an awkward cat-crouch, off-balance. He falls to his knees, rolls sideways. He whoops and begins to laugh very hard. The girl, who had sounded so desperate, is laughing too. Her shoulders are shaking with giggles and she ceases to move her legs, just rolling forwards, backwards on the swing.

A woman walks past talking to a tiny, fluffy white dog. The boys with the remote-control helicopter at the crest of the hill pin their eyes skyward to watch it hover; perspective makes it seem that it could be real, could be hanging just above the point of an Oxford tower.

I take a lukewarm shower and think of all of the things I need to do.

I take the laundry inside to the tune of the ice cream van.

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Jul 22, 2008 0

100

You know that old Coldplay song that goes, “we live in a beautiful world……”?

Don’t we indeed?

(botanic gardens, oxford, summer 2008)

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Jul 10, 2008 0

4 AM, Watching Foxes, Waiting to Emerge

We find it hard to wake at a civilized hour. At 4 AM we are wide-eyed, tossing and turning, reading and shutting off lights and turning them back on again. Even bottles of wine and a heavy meal don’t take the edge off that restlessness, and soon we find we are hungry again. We have half a sandwich each, then some cheese on toast.

We take turns kneeling at the window, starring out, feeling a wind on our tired faces. Once a fox saunters across the street. The-cat-we-briefly-adopted-who-now-hangs-out-nearby watches the fox with a mixture of interest and trepidation.

At 3 PM we rove the house feeling weary in our bones, wanting a nap, a deep, nighttime sleep. He takes a bath that lasts for over an hour while I re-read Harry Potter and wonder things like: am I dreaming?

We go into town and say hello to friends we haven’t seen in over a month.

“I feel like I’m swimming,” I say, miming a swimming motion. They seem to understand. Neither of us has any sense of time, or reality. One day it rains, the next it is glorious. We get off the bus and walk the wrong direction. It is as Pico Iyer writes: “under jet-lag, you lose all sense of who or where you are.”

We wait to emerge from the haze.

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