Here are several Very Important Summer Activities (or VISAs) that do not require a VISA.
1) Admire the clouds.
Slam open a dictionary or click on etymonline.com to look up the etymology of cloud, if you want, but it’s not a prerequisite for cloud-watching. Clouds are huge white boulders in the sky, like Stone Mountains tossed up in the blue heavens, but coconut-white—no, more like the snowy white Dufourspitze or the Dom in the Swiss Alps, except airborne; yes, I’m talking about cumulonimbus clouds on a nice sunny day.
Whoa, in Old English, the word for a “mass of rock” is clud, and some poet over 700 years ago looked up into the skies and thought, That cloud looks like a clud. Yes, clouds are awesome, rock-like masses floating in the sky, morphing before our very eyes into rabbits and houses and All Terrain Tactical Enforcers (AT-TE’s) from Star Wars Clone Wars.
Clouds turn me to stone, out of awe. Seeing one, I think, That cloud is way bigger even than those boulders I can touch at Rock City, and even that not-too-too-gigantic Rock-City scale of massiveness strikes me with the silence of nature’s ineffable aliveness and beauty.
I feel about clouds the way Ralph Waldo Emerson felt about stars. He said, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
During the last, recent drought, I keenly missed clouds. Here’s why, I think. (I’m going to substitute “clouds” for Emerson’s “stars” below, with my apologies to Ralph.)
The [clouds] awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
2) Enjoy getting into an old truck and taking a drive. I love our old Ford F-150 truck. I like that it is not new and that it has the solid body and blocky shape of a truck. It is what it is. And it smells especially good in summer, perhaps because the heat really brings out the fragrances of motor oil, transported wood (with errant and aromatic wood shavings still buried somewhere in the carpet), hot plastic, red dirt lost from work boots and old gardening shoes, the faintly scorched smell of the owner’s manual’s paper pages after bouts in extreme and punishing Georgia heat, a faint note of the public pool’s chlorine, and something else I haven’t been able to figure out.
So, when in summer I climb (and I mean climb) into our truck, I find it essential to drink in that truck smell, inhaling it deeply as I put on my seat belt. Then I crank her up and go to . . . Kroger or . . . my office or . . . Walgreens or . . . Wal-Mart or . . . the landfill. Sitting up so high in that delicious air makes me supremely happy.
3) Drive down Horseleg Creek Road in the brightest sunshine with Fleetwood Mac turned up. This is great to do on my way to the landfill in the truck. It is the corollary to the olfactory activity (I mean aromatherapeutic activity) mentioned in 2).
4) Wear a hat. However, it is also important to wear a hat in winter. Hats add pizzazz to any season. My favorite hat to wear in summer is a handsewn light-blue, washed-denim newsboy cap. In winter, I like tams and cloche hats. It’s always worth the hat hair.
5) Drive past an outdoor temperature display to find out how hot it is (as if you didn’t know already, with sweat trickling down your nose because the car’s air conditioner has not yet kicked in). And then decide whether or not you agree with the temperature posted there. Today, en route to Kroger, I went past a bank to see what the temperature was; the sign read “102.” I decided that that was probably pretty right, if only a few more degrees were added for those standing in the sun without a hat and with no breeze blowing.
One line of poetry sums up my feelings for the uniquely penetrating heat of a Southern summer. It was written by Jorie Graham, who read at UC Berkeley in 1996, when we were living across the way in Mountain View. Graham had just won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream of the Unified Field. She was dressed in black, rail-thin slacks and a flowing, black, long-sleeved shirt. I had read her award-winning book of poetry, and my husband kindly took off from work and drove me (and our beautiful new baby) across the Bay-area lunchtime traffic so I could hear Graham read from it. (I had also read another of her books, and the line below is one of the few that I did understand; and I am one of those willing to struggle with the obliquely and deeply communicative beauty of the most excellent poetry. I did not, however, understand then and still don’t understand now her poems with blanks in them.)
In her poem “Tennessee June,” Graham opens with a wonderful statement about the fierce temps of a Southern summer, and I always think of this line when I’m digging holes in the dry dirt of summer, under a punishing sun (or even when I’m just walking to the mailbox): “This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything and loves the flaw.”
6) Eat a corn dog slathered in ketchup and mustard.
7) Drink a very cold, very creamy chocolate shake.
8 ) Buy a fresh, succulent pineapple, cut it up, and eat its juicy sweetness.
9) Slide down the long, winding orange slide at the Northside Swim Center’s pool.
10) Play Mousetrap with someone under ten.
11) Go for a walk at dusk or right before dusk, when the heat has noticeably left the stage, and the lengthening shadows and subtle breezes make for a perfect walk, especially with all of the cicadas and lightning bugs coming out and making their symphony of sound and light.
12) Read a good detective novel or two.
13) Enjoy cleaning house and sorting through clothes and shoes and scarfs you never wear and things you and your family never use, and also go through stuff that’s broken or obsolete and of no use to anyone; then take these things to Goodwill or to the landfill (see number 3). It has made me happy to do this “house-cleaning” this summer when I’m able to do it because gradually I’m simplifying my life. I’m helping our house be more reflective of how my family and I really live. Also, taking care of my house because I want to makes my soul feel good, as if I’m also caring for me. Plus, really, who needs three opened and almost full bottles of rubbing alcohol. I didn’t know we had any since they were scattered on different shelves in our bathroom, so I kept going out and buying more when we needed rubbing alcohol. Oops. Going through our stuff helps me see what we have and where it is.
14) Finish lists wherever you want, at 14) even.
My husband and I were driving home at 8:25pm, this evening, and saw an awesome cumulonimbus (at least that’s what I called it) cloud in the sky. It was pink and blue and amazingly beautiful! It looked like an enormous mountain! We were both so thankful for such an humbling and exhilarating sight to behold!!
Cool! Thanks for sharing, Sharon!