Though I missed the solstice by a couple of weeks, this slim volume was well worth reading. I met Nina McLaughlin a few years ago when I took a one session workshop on book reviewing at Grub Street that she led.  She was a good teacher and a sparkling person. Turns out she lived right down the road in Cambridge. She also writes the weekly column in the now very meager Boston Globe Sunday book section.

This volume lies on, bathes in, and exults within feelings and memories. Summer, for the author, is a time of memories, dreaming, sensing, and empty, quiet, beautiful time.  She sets us a duality between “summer and winter, light and dark, ant and grasshopper, holly and oak, superego and id, and—the big one—life and death, the circle whose warm-cool palms cup us all”, and then she urges us to “bypass the black-and-white divisions, being awake to the paradoxical one-ness of it all.”

Sitting in the guest house in Vermont watching the sun move across Mt. Ascutney this morning, I found the following paragraph to be just perfect:  “Summer is earth’s memory. Summer is earth’s memory of all the fertile formlessness, everything arriving, wet-breathed, bloodied, burning.  Summer is the memory of what we know used to be, but can never wholly recall.  So we remember instead: the fattest blackberries too high to reach, prickers that scratch the arm, catch the strap of the sundress, berries on the bush warm, swollen, ready in the sun.”

Maclaughlin quotes some of my favorite authors, creating connections which made me smile—Tove Jansson’s ‘The Summer Book’ which is sitting on my desk waiting to be read; Thoreau’s Walden Pond where she swims in the summer; May Swenson’s poem ‘Swimmers’; D. H. Lawrence’s critique of American literature, also sitting on my desk; and Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XL in which he writes “Green was the silence, wet was the light.”

This is a lovely little book which you can read in one brief sitting.  It was only in writing this review and leafing through the book reading my marginalia that I discovered the final page which indicated that only 92 copies of this book, one for each day of the meteorological summer of 2020—have been letter press printed, numbered, and signed by the author.  I have #53 and so pleased that I do.