Summering

Camp is closed now, and attention turns toward the colder months. But before I slip on my wool socks, I want to share something about the season that just passed. 

Katherine May’s popular book Wintering explores retreat and rest during difficult periods of life. I’ve been thinking about a different kind of retreat—one that drew me out of professional responsibilities and into a closer relationship with my special place. 

I call it summering.

For me, summering means letting go of one kind of work and embracing another. Settling into the rhythms of a place. Letting its needs shape the day. Trading the work of my business for the pleasure of caring for the place that inspires this legacy work.

Sometimes it means shingling the woodshed or scraping decades of green paint from a windowsill. As the layers came away, I wondered which of my  ancestors had applied the paint I was now scraping off? Letting go of one part of my life allows another part to come fully into use: my hands, my grandfather’s tools, and a curiosity to learn what this place needs. There is something intimate, and weighty, about tending to a place that generations before have done so well. 

Now it is my turn to decide what needs keeping, what needs replacing, and what I can do with the skills and time I have.

Not all of summering is work. There is an arc to the season, May is opening: scrubbing corners and sweeping cobwebs. June is clearing trails. July is frivolity, and not a lick of “work”. August is transitional, floating in the sea or hammock, then finding blankets that got pushed away in the heat. September I return to reverential labor : closing shutters, draining water, hauling boats. Putting things away, admiring what I did, and noting what will have to wait til next year.

As you look back on your own summer, what did you learn from your place? How did you offer care? And what is already on your list for next year?
If it is planning for the next generation’s scraper and paintbrush, let’s talk.