Refreshment

I have a mixed relationship with summer. Don't get me wrong, I love the season itself. The lush green of verdant forests, running in the muggy heat until the sweat pours down your skin and you plunge into a cold lake, and the magic of late summer evenings are all things that I enjoy. The world is alive in summer. Heck, I even like the idea of summer, as Northrop Frye expresses it. Summer, Frye suggests, is the representation of Romance, the perfect world, Heaven. The typology is there.

The reality of summer doesn't alway measure up, though. For me, growing up, summer was when the students left my college town, making it feel empty. I remember summers working questionably legal jobs in Owen Sound, like moving bricks up uneven scaffolding without safety equipment (I never was paid for that). Summers could be great, but sometimes they could be slow, in all the bad senses of the word.

This summer has been refreshing in so many ways. Along with all the physical refreshments of summer, which I first alluded to, this summer has had deeper, more subtle, but more exquisite pleasures of refreshment, suggesting a shadow of Frye's Summer. Reunification with people you have not seen in years, with all the laughter that brings. Meeting new people who may become old friends. The delicious ache which comes through getting back into running. The soul-restoring quiet of a cottage from childhood memory, reading books which restore my spirit. Words of Truth at Grace Toronto. Remembering things which were forgotten. Becoming re-newed.

Sometimes, "thank you" doesn't seem enough.