This is where I’ll be spending the day.

Come back later.

Peruse these summer songs.

Take a day.

Touch the grass.

Or smoke it.

Whatever floats your boat.

The intense heat of last week threatened to melt away all the golden trappings of this Solid Gold Summer like some gold-foil-wrapped chocolate bunny from the perilous Easter period – but summer has a way of proving itself invincible, refusing to yield even to its own incendiary machinations. 

The music is magic as the Solid Gold dancers take to the stage of my hazy childhood memories – sequins sparkling in the roving spotlights, slicing through all the dramatic smoke effects as their limbs flail in impossible feats of human movement.

Glimmers of glory shimmer in the starry wide-eyed wonder of a little boy watching all the flashy magic playing out on the television. What might it feel like to spin in the middle of all those shards of glittering light – to be a disco ball with every light beam trained on you? Where all you have to do is spin and reflect the light back onto the world – the conduit, the vessel, the portal – resplendent in gold and mirrors and taking it all in only to give it right back in some incongruent generosity of spirit of which no one would ever quite believe you were capable. It’s not something we have come to expect of our golden icons. 

When I think back to the boy I used to be, the kid who watched those Solid Gold dancers with rapture and transfixion, studying the way their sequined light pierced the stage night, I remember the ferocity he sought to capture, and how he vowed one day to be just as bewitching as the spectacle parading before him. 

My dreams of gold read differently now, and I am starting to see things from a changed point of view. My vessel is solid gold; the rest of the world and its people may be gilded, facades and shells of empty, misguided brokenness, but I somehow remain whole, I remain true. I remain solid through and through. The tacit admission is that I’m just a little tarnished – an ironic flip of all that is expected from my sparkling superficiality, from all that has admittedly come before – with the graver implication being that I was tarnished by own hand and head. Overthinking and overanalyzing are the bane to many a Virgo, and I am far from an exception to this overwrought conundrum. 

Yet it is precisely at such times when I remind myself that I still have the power to enthrall and enchant, as I’m reminded by friends and strangers alike, in ways overt and covert because nobody willingly gives me any flowers despite how much they know I love them. Or maybe it’s because they know how much I love them, and love has never been easy to come by for me. 

The rest of the world gets the show then, and for anyone who is still reading, that goes for you too. The ones I seek to reach are infuriatingly unaware of these spoils. My golden splendor spins with purpose only for itself, for the sake of spinning. It’s something to do, something to fill the mind when more disruptive thoughts might derail an entire summer.

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay

Summer fleeting, summer flying by, summer waiting for no man… I feel the swift rush of time in summer more than any other seasons, likely because we want it to last. Its golden splendor seeps into daily summer living, the way heat eventually comes to land in the earth and stay there until September, but once the nights turn it’s difficult to make the warmth last. For now, I let it soak into the skin, into whatever waning darkness remains in my hair like that of some silver-headed wolf. 

Gold hints of Egyptian pharaohs swirl us deeper into the past, even though it was the same sun, the same earth, the same stretch of desert still baking in the heat. Sands cycling through time, indeed marking time like the trickle of an hourglass, and so go the days of our lives. Fitting, as summer meant I could reconnect to my soap operas – the entire NBC daytime line-up from ‘Days of Our Lives’ to ‘Santa Barbara’. I don’t even know how many of those shows still run, or whether it’s all streaming now or some other service I’ve ignored and allowed to leave me behind. Summer is no time to learn a new thing. 

Instead, I gleefully get lost in all the golden light, embracing summer for the momentary joy at hand. Forget the other seasons if we can have this one golden summer. 

Hummingbirds love these deep-throated salvia blooms – because who doesn’t enjoy a deep-throat experience? I’ve planted several in pots on the patio so that we can watch them flit from bloom to bloom, darting with pinpoint precision and split-second motions. It’s one of the most enchanting displays of the summer. Enticing the hummingbirds is always a worthwhile endeavor. They usually favor colorful and interesting blooms, so everybody wins.

A sign that mid-life malaise has kicked in: I missed the due date for my eye appointment by a year. Usually I am right on top of that benefit, as I’m only allotted a check-up and new pair of glasses or contacts every two years, and my eyesight is deteriorating faster than that schedule. This time I let things go for an extra year beyond that – mostly out of laziness and such an onerous experience last visit (clearly I didn’t take my own advice and find a new company). This year the wait time wasn’t any better, I’m just more resigned to accepting that it’s always going to take an hour and a half for a five minute appointment. That little shift made all the complaining go away. There are badder fish to fry.

As for the new specs, I like their less bulky frames – it’s keeping with a simplicity I’m trying to bring into my life. Same thing with the underwear selection, because that’s what most people came here for – no judgment, all respect.

Mary Haynes may have doted on a fictitious perfume called ‘Summer Rain’, and I myself may have a bottle of the Hermes beauty ‘Un Jardin Apres la Mousson’ recalling the garden after a summer deluge, but I’m still trying to find ways of appreciating a rainy summer day, and I’m not quite succeeding.

Instead, I take a rainy night and turn it into an abstract study in contemplation, painting it somewhere in my mind and streaking it with blurry lines that obfuscate as much as reveal. Strange and wonderful the way rain brings the streetlights to electric, reflecting light; this is why they wet the pavement when they shoot movies. Once you notice that you’ll see it in every outside movie street scene.

With the possible sweet exception of the linden tree blooms, no other summer flower reminds me of childhood, and in such unassuming and visually quiet fashion, as a simple hedge of privet. It immediately rekindles summer memories of Provincetown, of family vacations, of nights walking in hot and humid air, which always carries floral fragrance more potently than any other time of the year.

Like the index tree, privet doesn’t shout its presence with bold and colorful flowers – it speaks solely through its sweet and somewhat subtle fragrance. When appearing en masse during their blooming season, it manages to fill the surrounding air with a lovely perfume, and most don’t know where it’s coming from since the show is far short of grand ostentation. It speaks to me more sweetly because of this.

Welcome to the Northeast, where a stretch of upper-90-degree days can suddenly turn to rainy mush in the mid-70’s and no one knows how to dress or act or behave anymore. Add in an unhealthy dash of Mercury in retrograde motion and you have the making of a minefield of moods just waiting to be set off by the slightest foraging mouse. Mice be forewarned.

I look back to this past Sunday, when my niece and I took a drive out to Manchester, Vermont for some maple cream ice cream (which is more than worth a drive if you’ve ever had it). The scenes along the way were idyllic; the company sublime. It lives in my head on the rainy mornings.

I’ve said this before and it bears repeating: I think my favorite Peanuts character is Woodstock. 

Most people peg me as a Lucy, a few wiser folks see me as Snoopy, but I’m probably closer to Woodstock. I mean, the thing wears feathers. Hello. This is a kindred spirit.

Like Snoopy, he just wants to have some fun and live his life without bothering anyone else.

That’s a good philosophy.