Holding Summer

Every summer I become a bit of a collector.

Beach stones go into my pockets. Flowers come inside and land in jars. Feathers, shells, seed pods, bits of bark, and other things that absolutely did not need to come home with me somehow do. I take photographs of the sky, the woods, the water, the horses, GiGi, and whatever else catches my eye. Lately that includes the faces I seem to find everywhere, appearing in rocks, wood, moss, or simply in the arrangement of debris on the forest floor.

Apparently simply experiencing summer is not enough. I would also like to keep some of it.

Usually, August makes this particularly easy. The garden begins producing faster than I can keep up, flowers tumble over one another, and there are tomatoes on every available surface. There are berries to freeze, basil to turn into pesto, beans to pick, and zucchini appearing with the persistence of junk mail.

Not this year. The drought has changed the landscape of summer. The garden is trying, and I give it credit for that. There are things growing, things blooming, and things making a valiant attempt at becoming dinner. Abundance is not exactly the word I would use. Even the weeds seem to have reconsidered their plans.

And perhaps that has made me notice what is here even more.

A handful of flowers feels worth bringing inside. A few berries are worth picking. A beautiful stone still goes into my pocket. The Queen Anne's lace is blooming along the edges of the field, the woods are full of tiny worlds I somehow never noticed before, and there is still more beauty than I could possibly gather up and carry home. And I keep trying.

Holding Summer feels like one more thing for the collection.

I started with opaque blue-aqua glass, layered it with deep red dichroic, and topped it with transparent turquoise. The result has wonderful depth, with flashes of darker color appearing and disappearing through all that blue and turquoise as the light changes.

Holding summer isn't about preserving some perfect version of it. This year has made that particularly clear. It's about noticing what is here while it is here. Picking the flower. Pocketing the stone. Taking the photograph. Eating the three tomatoes that actually managed to ripen before something else got to them. And perhaps wearing a little bit of summer isn't such a bad idea either. After all, pockets can only hold so many rocks.