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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Early Heat

**photo of lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, by DieselDemon, Flickr Creative Commons.

Today’s high is 82 degrees. It is bunched and muggy and mostly euphoric on the sidewalks. The temperature has set the city into a different tone today, one of skirt-awareness, bare-arm awareness, warmth-on-skin awareness.

My route to the ferry landing passes a bus stop that is a long, peopled alcove, like Venus’ half shell. People there seem bored, waiting, like they could be prone to catcalls or sneering. They haven’t, so far, and I’ve needed to grant (reluctantly, sometimes, and the reluctance is with good reason) points to Staten Island. 

This morning I passed the bus stop without incident, but next went by two teenage boys, one of whom was speaking to the air in front of me as I walked past.  I was surprised by the anatomical specificity of what he was saying. The other boy said to him, “Are you talking to her?” The first boy spun away and said, “Hell No!” It was one of those teenage things. I have no idea to whom he was talking. He was a good-looking kid, which might help him--and I do think our culture tells him it’s fine to be that direct. Maybe this will last a year or two, his way of talking.  In a way I felt sympathetic for his raw teenage struggle, his awkwardness.  I wondered how far this would get him. (On the other hand, ick, boundaries.)

But it was just part of the heat-wave morning, and I breezed onto the ferry, where the front and back doors of the ship were left ajar for air to waft in from the bay, and we multitudes sat on long, multi-colored benches, trying not to crib body heat in our proximity. The sun was low and a heated yellow in the sky, the Statue of Liberty glinting in its light. The water had a muggy, blurred edge.

**photo by Lindsey Turner, Flickr Creative Commons. 

Later, at a Midtown elevator, a man in a suit said to me, “I was waiting for you." I said, “Ah. Well, thanks,” meaning for not letting the door shut too fast. I remarked about the weather. “Hot day!” he declared. I observed that we were expecting rain, and that it might get cooler. “Yes, but HOT rain!” he said. We laughed, though I was a little uncertain. “You will not be satisfied!” he said. “By this rain,” he continued after a pause.

Heat waves bring out strange things, yes. It is an electric day. 

Fall at Last, Austin, Book Festival

**photo of Barton Springs, Austin, Tex., by AnnainAustin, Flickr Creative Commons.

In Seattle, the desire for cold-water swimming was about seeking clarity and a bright sharpness in gray weather. It’s also about the feeling of sinking into cool water--even if that water turns out to be fiercely cold in lakes shaded by mountains, ha.

Here in the state where I was raised, Texas, it’s mid-October and the long, wild summer seems to have abated for now. Labor Day is a false "end' to the season--we maintained 90s temperatures until around Oct. 15. This weekend I head out for cool-water swimming at Barton Springs, in Austin. The water temperature will likely be around 66 degrees, which will be lovely and compares pretty favorably with the average Cascade lake.

It’s going to be a great weekend, heading from green Houston to tawny Austin in the golden fall, in light that plays especially well on the bone-white Hill Country limestone surfaces.

**photo of Pedernales River, Texas Hill Country, by Jdeeringdavis on Flickr Creative Commons.

I'm going for the Texas Book Festival, where I hope to hear readings by Jonathan Lethem, Sherman Alexie, Geoff Dyer, and maybe Marion Winik, Meg Wolitzer, and Diana Kennedy. I also hope to see a few friends, and maybe attend a taping of the arts radio show Overheard with Evan Smith.

Re-charging myself is another purpose of the trip. Austin, like Seattle, has more 30s and 40s creative workers than Houston, and is a bit more densely populated as well. I’m hoping that Austin will be a nice trial run for deciding whether I should move to another city, like New York or somewhere else.

So, don’t I like Houston a lot? I do like Houston, and it has much that is not known elsewhere as Houston-defining. It has truly original food twists and developments, and an interesting art scene. It has many really great people. That said, it has the dichotomy of politics that we’ve recently seen in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has Maseratis and Porsche SUVs and people who seem not to care about the extreme social inequalities here. Its inner loop neighborhoods have many bike trails, which is great—but the city also has people who are afraid to bicycle because drivers are habitually unaware of anyone but themselves on the road. Its racial and social inequities are evident on its bus system.

So, yes, I don’t love everything here. And, you might say, does one ever? Here’s the thing—let's hope some things will change. Even in other Texas cities, there’s more driver respect for pedestrians and cyclists, from what I’ve seen. When I visited Fort Worth in May, I was struck by the non-flashy cars and the fact that cars didn’t pull up right next to pedestrians when they walked along a sidewalk and crossed a parking lot entrance. The so-called rolling stop is standard in Houston—drivers’ way of saying they’re more important and that you should just hurry up and get out of the way—and, we’ll skip the pun here, it has to stop.

All that said, here in Houston I’ve found that thinking in a Zen way has helped me. I recently was told by friends about the website ZenHabits.net, by Leo Babauta.

If you’ve seen Babauta’s website, you know it’s the tale of a mid-30s, married father of six who simplified his life and makes a living writing and talking about what he loves. He shows us how to live minimally, be at peace, and still travel. Behind it all, he demonstrates a healthy relationship and parenthood. It’s inspiring stuff, and the website is appealingly simple—generally without photos, featuring instead large-print text on white, working to avoid jarring us with more online images. It seems to work.

This kind of calmness is what I need. It’s maybe what we all need. A recent passage tells how to deal with people who annoy us:  people who behave badly in traffic, talk too loudly, are rude to us. One approach is to think that others are like twigs in a stream in which we all float. Each twig is doing its own thing, and isn’t trying to annoy us. We’ll peacefully interact with the other twigs, and won’t let them bother us. Another is to recognize that others act badly out of fear or discomfort. If we think about this, and maybe give them mental hugs, we’re better off, too.  

Learning to deal with things that annoy us has been useful in Houston, because there is so much here that I'd like to change. Treating these things as twigs in a stream is actually a bit better for my blood pressure. I’d like good transit again, and to see greater density on the streets. I’d like to be among more people in their 30s and 40s who are out doing things, rather than arriving by car and departing the same way.

Having said that, I’ve enjoyed living again in a garden-y city. Houston is green, it is lush, with bougainvilleas blooming and tangerines and limes starting--here in nearly-November. New York has parks and tree-lined streets in some neighborhoods, but I recall walking (when I lived there) and wishing for a bit of green to break up the wide sidewalks that extend to the curbs.

Here in Houston, the inner-loop streets are green, but I seldom see many pedestrians, and I miss that. Frequently I’m walking along a sidewalk and see another person, and my heart leaps: company in pedestrianism! Then they get into a car. This happens with sad frequency. At times I see someone else walking and, because I’m so unused to having others on the streets with me, I feel slightly antisocial. This is the feeling that isolation-by-car-culture builds, quite frankly. In September, a visitor from Cleveland talked about crowds on the street in Montreal, as he and I sat in a Houston café, and we looked out the windows onto a main thoroughfare and saw no crowds at all. I recall crowds, from Seattle and Chicago and New York and elsewhere. But I almost had to be reminded of their presence elsewhere.

The fact is, July through September, and sometimes earlier or later, Houston is not a pleasant place to walk. The heat, sun, and humidity are everything. Throughout the summer, I rode my bike, and I saw others biking. But I had to be careful in the same ways that I did when walking on near-zero days in Chicago, when the wind whipped between buildings and I flexed my fingers in double-ply gloves. I had to carry water, keep to shade, and survive. In mid-June, a Boston visitor asked about my decision to be car-free here. Although he was moving to New York and looked forward to selling his car and taking the train, he was astounded that I would go without a car in Houston. I asked if he wondered because it was so hot, or because it was spread out. He said for both reasons.

Yes, getting through the summer in Houston without a car was not easy. At first, riding my bike in sunlight was fun. After seven years in Seattle, I am still glad for all sunlit days. Even when days were long and hot, as long as they were unhumid—and humidity is less frequent in the ongoing drought—I was in pretty good spirits. But oppressive heat causes cabin fever. There’s nowhere to go, unless we have swimming pools or get in cars and drive to large, air-conditioned spaces.

How I did it, car-free: I learned to live differently, to live simply. But I also felt oppressed by heat. I biked, but then I collapsed at home and rested, and I felt that the long hot day was eating up my life. I stayed indoors for much of the afternoon. The evenings were often nearly as hot.

It became clear to me: Although I am infinitely happier where there is sunlight, and I was never as bereft in Houston as in Seattle, I’d be better off spending summers in cooler climates. But in a place with light.

So, what is ideal in cities, in your opinion? It seems to me that escaping from crowds--as one can do in Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, and some other cities--can be nice. In New York, the fact that people are almost always everywhere that one is—that’s wearing to me. I grew up with vegetable farms and horses and raccoons and camping, and I love having those things as an option—not as a difficult mental transition to make from one's daily life.

Some European cities are good at balancing nature with urban: Copenhagen, and cities in Germany and the Netherlands, have large parks and trees that ring cities. Barcelona has promenades to the ocean.

Are the streets of very old cities sufficiently green? One friend in Scotland says they're too tightly set for her, and she misses the trees of Austin. Would I tire of cobbled streets, narrow lanes, houses everywhere? In some cities, I feel like Heidi, looking for a church tower to climb, trying to see the Alps.

At any rate, now the weather is gorgeous: Cool, sudsy, brisk in the mornings and calmly cloudless in the afternoons. Days begin and end with genial sun. We have earned it, and hope to continue it. I am happy that the outdoor weather matches my idea of fall: golden air. Here's to a trip to Austin, and to continuing to reevaulate our cities. 

**photo of foliage in Texas Hill Country by Gruenemann, Flickr Creative Commons.ere's to a trip to 

Early Summertime

photo of Wortham Fountain by Buffalo Bayou Park, Houston, by eflon, Flickr Creative Commons.
**         

            For Memorial Day weekend, the traditional gateway to summer, I bused to Fort Worth to see two cousins. They're old enough to have 40-something kids, but these cousins run an active organ-building shop that employs people as passionate about music as themselves. They also busily interact with neighbors and friends, and sit each day on the porch to watch birds pull antics in tall pecan trees, red oaks, and blue chaste trees.

            They live all summer in their rambling, high-ceilinged old north Texas house with open windows. The cousins don’t use air conditioning, it seems.  
            Each morning of my visit, cool air wafted in the tall old casement windows, along with sharp and detailed bird-calls.

            In Houston--four hours south of Fort Worth and 20 miles from the Gulf  -- I had had the a/c on, at night, for exactly one week. My 1943 building has old windows, some of which stick. Plus, Houston is a place where humidity eventually descends. Of my three neighbors, two had used a/c since mid-March. I was being a hold-out, waiting till late May to turn on air in coastal Texas.

photo of Westheimer Street in Houston, J. Jackson Photography, Flickr Creative Commons.
**

            Still, I was a happy hold-out. The natural way pleases me: open windows, saving energy, feeling air. There are many things I could say about heat and humidity--one is that I learned to adjust more easily to both by living in northern states.

            Surprising, yes. In New York when humidity rose from the ground, women wore sundresses and skirts, and men wore the lightest fabrics. We opened windows, employed fans. The same was true in Chicago, in Missoula, MT (where part of the summer can be fire-cracker hot), and in Seattle for the occasional heat waves of a week or two.  

           Heat varied greatly, from place to place -- like the types of plants that can grow in each particular soil.

             Philadelphia, 80 miles inland, was hotter and more humid, for longer, than New York. In Chicago, as they say, it's cooler by the lake. My first Chicago summer was spent three miles west of the lake, where my roommate (a European) and I sometimes lay on the floor like beached cats, to feel the better air along the floorboards. When I moved nearer to Lake Michigan, I could usually catch a breeze by walking along the lake. On certain days, though, nothing short of setting sail toward Michigan seemed to help.

            Naturally, all this experience in withstanding heat on certain days, while being aware that eventually the heat will go away – as one is certain in northern climates – tended to build my hubris. I began to feel that I was a heat expert.

            (Yes, I was all about the high-velocity fan. My favorite brand is Vornado, if you want to know.)

            It’s true that sometimes heat is hard to take, even in northern climates. In normally temperate Seattle, a heat wave of a week’s duration could bring many of us to work with raccoon eyes -- not having slept well on our overheated bed sheets the previous night.

            Maybe peculiarly, I regarded all this as character-building. I thought of it as what we did to make up for weeks and weeks of cool weather, or for having lolled in sunlight on Lake Washington beaches crowded with suddenly lively Northwest-dwellers.

            Because I still feel a bit that way, I’m glad that I was able to sleep at the cousins’ house with the windows open on Memorial Day weekend in north Texas. Lying there with breezes wafting in, hearing the trees stir -- felt lovely. With a good-enough fan, there are nights when it could be done here in Houston as well.

            I guess that's what's changed for me: Now I see Houston's weather as varying, too. I see the individual parts, the mornings and late afternoons. In the same way that I now notice which plants we have at different points, I now see that some mornings start out cooler, while others don't--and that some evenings, after the crush of certain days, are sublime for sitting in wafting breezes with an iced coffee.



Photo of interior of Brasil coffeehouse, Houston, by Sarah Fleming, Flickr Creative Commons.
**

            It’s still early, but I like things about the summer. Definitely, it's a thing to prepare for, like winter in Chicago. Handily, my apartment is old, shady, and wasn't built with only a/c in mind. Dressing for the weather is important. This means choosing fabrics that breathe--which I can find at Goodwill but not at TJ Maxx and Marshall’s, which sell a baffling selection of synthetic-material, short-sleeved “sundresses." I carry Gatorade and water. During the heat of the day, I walk slowly and in the shade, and am not outside for long periods. Working indoors during the main part of the day helps. Because evenings can be nice, I probably wouldn’t want to spend them working, anyhow.

            Does this mean I'm finished with cold climates? Not really, no. It just means, I think, that I want to experience the many flavors of a place's most emblematic season. I want to hold back summer a bit, so that I can look at it more closely. I don't want it rushing by outside of some air-conditioned car--not all the time, at least.

            By the same token, I think I'd like to spend at least a week (or more) in fall and winter in the Northeast or in mountains. Because those are traditionally my favorite seasons, in crisp, golden-aired climates. And guess where the cousins always spent their summer vacations? Colorado or New Mexico. "We wanted to escape the heat!" said one of the cousins. Yep, I can get that.

            But it's early yet, and I'm enjoying getting to know the seasons here. A week after Fort Worth, I sat one night with two new friends at Brasil, a Houston coffeehouse with a large courtyard next to an arty street. In the leafy shade of palmettos and other plants, we can spend time with our weather. All three of us had returned this spring to Houston, and we knew the city. We looked around at the late-night shadows of trees, felt the light air, and collectively agreed, “You know, I like it here.”

photo of crape myrtles at Menil Collection, Houston, by J.E. Theriot, Flickr Creative Commons.

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