Swingin'

Summers in Louisiana are not much different from winters, not so much as you would notice unless you had been here for both seasons. Winter is long and wet, with the sort of dampness that gets into your bones and lies there with a chill that just won’t go away. A chill that makes one dread the setting of the evening sun and long for the sweat of summer.

Summers are long and wet, with a humidity that wraps around you like a stuffy, old wool blanket. But it doesn’t start out that way. Before turning downright sultry, summer here starts out with a freshness and a reassurance that one more winter has fallen behind and lighter, brighter days are before us. The sun beats the mildew from the corners where she’s been lurking all winter and exposes her to cleansing light. You begin to feel as though you can take a full breath of air without choking on the mold.

That's just an illusion, of course. One can never inflate the lungs completely in the heaviness of the south Louisiana air. Humidity defines our days and is the gauge by which we discern the good from the bad. I soon learned the subtleties that distinguish days of 100% humidity, and no rain on the horizon, from those of a mere 85.

To fully enjoy my summers here, I soon learned the joys of rising early to sit in the cool of the patio swing, anticipating the slow invasion of the morning sun, lighting up another day; and the pleasantness of dusk after a day in the sun, when life slowed down to sort itself out again.

Those moments, now, for me, are of the nature of bittersweet. I ofte recall my mother, on her too infrequent visits, sitting here early morning, enjoying her coffee with the jays and the wrens and various species of waterfowl. We’d laugh at the acrobatics of the squirrels and the occasional insistence of a red-headed woodpecker. We said very little in those moments, having said too much, already, and having learned, with age, how truly vacuous words can be.

And evenings … well, evenings, too often, are a reminder of the folly of dreaming out loud. My husband and I would sit on that patio swing and discuss the day’s work - what went right, what went wrong. Mostly we made plans to do things differently … tomorrow.

Sometimes tomorrow never comes. Now, I cannot sit here without some sense of their presence and their absence and more than a little sense of regret. I don’t know if even the brightest summer sun can chase away all the shadows of winter.