Sunny Mondays in summer hit differently. Their intrinsically depressing nature is blunted by the power of the season, a reminder that nature is what will always matter in the end. Mondays are a human construct. Summer is invincible. Here is our weekly blog recap…

Woodstock kicked the last week off in whimsical fashion.

Weather whiplash is a requisite part of summer these days.

Maple and bamboo light in the attic at night.

Triggering summer scents carried by the breeze.

Rainy abstract, taking out the night.

A summer holiday with the twins marks the passing of precious time.

Scarlet bee draw brings all the bees to the yard.

New spectacles, old jockstrap.

A feast for the hummingbirds in a brilliantly-colored salvia.

Embodying golden splendor in mesh netting.

Solid gold summer realizations come when they want to come.

Out pooling for the day: Do Not Disturb.

A golden summer night makes the journey home.

Soleil summer hallucinations backed by a driving beat and a hazy heat.

Golden 80’s glory days for those of us getting old.

Dazzlers of the Day included Mark Harkenrider, Meg Stalter, Evan Mulrooney, and Erling Haaland.

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.