It's Still July
on waiting and things that ripen
This essay has existed in fragments for several years, but I now feel I have a handle on it, as I have recently spiraled into a rage after seeing middle-aged women call July 5th the start of “spooky season”.
I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping on the floor to stay cool, waking up to house centipedes crawling over my naked body, and being unable to yell as my voice disappeared in the night. I’d adopted a new sleep schedule to adapt to both the blinding light and the heat, as I do neither well. (I’m primed for winters and moderate summers. Not hell’s asshole )
Here along the Great Lakes, the fireflies are in the peak of their mating season, flickering silent love songs beneath the sassafras tree in full green flush. The peaches on my neighbor’s tree have grown rosy where the sun has kissed them, and I’ve yet to enter the zucchini onslaught of August. I can’t see any acorns on the trees, at least not yet, and the corn is only knee high. Hell, the apples are still tart little green balls, hardly enough to be made into a pie, let alone something edible.
I won’t insult the individual for deciding that July 5th was an appropriate time, nor will I those who choose to decorate for Christmas on November 1st; however, my demeanor towards the increasingly popular cultural practice of speedrunning every season in order to stay suspended in the feeling of a holiday for as long as artificially possible is… dismal.
If one paid attention solely to the shelves of Target or any other big-box store, one would easily be led to believe that fall begins in late July and that Halloween begins in September. Winter starts mid-October, and Christmas lasts about two months. Valentine’s Day is a week after New Year’s, and New Year’s is 5 minutes after Christmas. Through simulated symbols, the natural progression of the seasons gets screwed, resulting in the changing of decor in place of tracking animal migrations.
Nature’s progression is slower and far more delicious than whatever’s being cooked up at the Target HQ.
When I lived in Portland, I spent one and a half years volunteering at a local organic garden, learning how to work with the soil and seasons in order to produce abundance. Anything we grew, we could take home and eat, and any extras (and there were always extras) would be fed to the local homeless population, with some of the food going to the Buddhist monastery.
People of all ages and backgrounds were welcome to volunteer upon walking through the metal gate. Some worked for a day and never returned. Some for a few weeks. Some had been there for years. I went every Sunday, and occasionally on Wednesdays.
Time moves differently with dirt under your nails. I’ve experienced no deeper satisfaction than watching things that I’ve planted take root, grow, blossom, and fruit, and then watch as little hands pick the ripe goodness and take a big bite, getting tomato juice all over their face.
Come fall, we’d take all the apples we’d harvested, regardless of whether or not they were perfect, and spend the whole day cutting out the worm-eaten bits and pressing what remained in a 100-year-old cider press. Imagine if the sun had a taste.
Each Sunday, something was different. The kale had shot up a bit more, the cucumbers fuller, aphids had taken over the cabbage, or the first of the tomatoes had started to ripen. Time itself is never in a hurry; all things arise in time.
But everything happens NOW when it comes to advertising. Buy Now! on sale Now! The eternal nowness of the digital world is perfect for advertising, as its never-endingness is endlessly exploitable. Everything is happening all at once, and everything is urgent and important. This is even seen in the behavior of comment sections when an individual fails to speak of the entire history of everything said and unsaid in a single breath, and someone pipes up, “but what about X?” followed by the masses chiming in with their what-abouts.
Nature has its cycles and requires preparation. There is a Now, but it is momentary. There is a Then, and there is a Later. You have to plant the kale now in order to eat it later. What we did back then didn’t work; let us plant somewhere else. Direct experience with cause-and-effect forces responsibility and action; you have to make a choice. You cannot do it all, so you must prioritize your actions: which, if the need for perfection is dropped (which it quickly is when it comes to gardening), results in the satisfaction store shelves fail to deliver.
Through advertisements, artificial acceleration of time, we lose touch with impermanence. The fig scented candle, while it might collect dust, will never rot. It will never fall to the earth and be picked apart by ants and microbes; it will never join back with the forces from whence it came. A garden teaches you that sweetness has its weeks, tomatoes come all at once, and winter will always arrive whether or not you are prepared for it. Artificiality promises a frozen feeling; Christmas can last forever if you keep buying it. But real things, things with heart, with mud, with skin in the game, are beautiful because they end.
Easy purchases bring easy joy. It exists as a spark, there, then dead. Nothing is learned. Nothing is gained.
Labor brings something different: There is a certain kind of satisfaction that can only come from mud. A tomato is never just a tomato; you planted it from a seed and watched the first leaves break through the soil. You cared for that seedling, preened off its first flowers, and pinched off the dead leaves to make way for new ones. You watched insects chew through its first fruit in disappointment, fat gashes dropping onto the looped rotten flesh to the earth. And then there was the second fruit, a little misshapen, sort of looking like an old man’s face, but it was something you could call yours. And how sweet it tasted. And how sweet was the memory in the middle of winter when it snowed for a full night, and the roads froze so thick you could ice skate on them.
It’s still July. The body sweats in July. The body waits for the fruits to ripen for the geese to fly south. The body acquires new freckles or grows a few shades deeper, it is invigorated and exhausted keeping up with the sun.
It’s still July, and July it will remain regardless of what the marketing men sell you.