Summer Places

**Photo by Pleasant Point Inn, Flickr Creative Commons. Maine. 

Our setting: a 1930s kitchen with wide windows. Peonies, pink and white and multi-layered, brim from tin cans. All is quiet. 

Yesterday was trains and crowds and noise. 

This morning I stood and looked at the impervious blue horizon of New York Bay, the view from my housemate's tall window. 

This is an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

Each day in these boroughs is stirring in countless ways. Moods change like air currents, like the ocean. In the summer, energy builds--and it is nice to release it in a calm day. 

I recall heat-wave days in Seattle, rare spans adding up to two or so weeks each summer. Skirts, sandals, hollering. Outdoor seating, bars, green-markets. Full Lake Washington beaches, bathers in patched-together thrift-store swimsuits. A populace suddenly finding use for sunglasses. A normally quiet people who hollered as they walked streets late into the night. Beaming rowdiness. 

**Photo in Maine by Carl Lender, Flickr Creative Commons.**

Each summer weekend in New York is a bit like this, but with the addition of hundreds of thousands of tourists.

I often like to lie low. I love Monday through Thursday because they are more normal, less whooping.

In summer, New Yorkers go to their habitual places. Many drive or train to un-fancy cabins and little houses that aren’t outfitted for winter, set in woods, by quiet lakes, along the Hudson River.

They return on Monday, talking about zucchini and tomatoes and sugar snap peas. They love these spots with wood-paneled walls, afternoon light, drinks on the porch, chats at little stores.

**Currants, by Liz West, Flickr Creative Commons 

The introvert in me appreciates such breaks. I like to be sheltered by forest and find mysteries among the tall trees.

By contrast, yesterday ended loudly and fulsomely, after dinner in a non-green section of New Jersey on the Hudson’s edge. Then a train under the Hudson, a subway to the ferry. Waiting in the large and mall-like ferry landing. A band played ‘70s-style R&B electro-funk music. It was midnight, then 12:05, and the ferry had not arrived. With the delay came uncertainty: Until recently, the ferry arrived hourly on weekends, and none of us were sure we weren't returning to such a schedule. Two children under seven whirled and slid a breakdance. Their skill was exhilarating--but how many of us clapped willingly and how many were captive onlookers there in the fluorescent lighting? We watched for the ferry's arriving orange/blue bulk, for wide glass doors to slide open to admit the massive, waiting crowd.

It was a lot for midnight, as it sometimes is.

Today, I am in the 1930s kitchen, here on Staten Island.  I sit at a formica table, looking toward a plane tree and a vegetable garden. A different house-mate rolls ruggelagh dough. She has poured chai iced tea into glasses for us both. 

The craftsmanship makes me happy: the preparation of the dough, the addition of fig jam, and lemon and sugar in the tea.

This kitchen is like a summer cabin, here on this island that was New York's summer escape in decades past. “Must be the wood paneling,” says my housemate, referring to the wood cabinets.

**Photo of Pennsylvania forest, by Nicholas A. Tonelli, Flickr Creative Commons. 

I will talk to nature-seekers. Cabin-goers. Ecologists and naturalists and nature writers.

We'll see what I learn.

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