Wait for It! Twilight to Sunrise Timelapse Video. 120 minutes in 27 seconds. 4:15 to 6:15 a.m. 71° F. July 12, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
Tag: july
Summer is… (and Yours?)
In my newsletter two weeks ago, I confessed my dislike of summer and invited you to send me emails defending the season. Hundreds of you responded, so what follows is a tiny and somewhat random sampling of your terrific contributions, for which I thank you.
Sam Sifton, in the Cooking newsletter, described the compression of time as we age: “Back-to-school advertising has started to show up in my feeds, and it’s depressing. Summers lasted forever when I was a child. Now they hurtle past, express trains bound for shorter days and hard shoes.”
Summer’s meaning and virtues hinge on place, age and more. “Childhood summer is the wilds of the neighborhood but grown-up summer is a hot car,” wrote Scott Williams of Salt Lake City. “Alpine summer is the smell of pine sap but downtown summer is the smell of asphalt. Summer on vacation is a novel but summer at home is a repair manual.”
Summer, many of you noted, is about certain fruits at their ripest, certain flavors at their peak, certain tastes that hide from us or are muted during the other parts of the year. “Only summer gives us blackberries for jelly and cobblers,” wrote Cheryl Roddy of Ooltewah, Tenn. “Only in summer can blueberries and peaches be turned into jams and frozen for winter pies. Only in summer do tomatoes taste like tomatoes and okra and beans grow in my garden, and butter-slathered, fresh-boiled corn makes me shout ‘Hallelujah! Continue reading “Summer is… (and Yours?)”
Saturday Morning
Leave it alone…
let the bones cool…
~ Lisa Taddeo, Three Women (July 9, 2019)
Notes:
- Inspired by: “One of the most difficult aspects of the frantic rush through a busy life is that we often do not allow even the smallest notion of “completion” to enter the picture of our daily lives. We often rush from task to task, so much so that the end of one task is just the invitation to start another. There are no gaps in between in which we could take even a few seconds to sit, to take stock, to realize that we have just completed something. Just the reverse: how many times do we hear ourselves say, “I haven’t achieved anything at all today?” If you can practice cultivating a sense of completeness- even a glimmer, right now, in this moment, with the little things of life- there is a chance that you would be better able to cope with those aspects of mind that keep telling you that you are not there yet; not yet happy, not yet fulfilled. You might learn that you are complete, whole, just as you are.” ~Mark Williams & Danny Penman, Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (via Make Believe Boutique)
- Photo (via Newthom)
Before Air-Conditioning*
Later on, in the Depression thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines. Just to watch them handling thick woollen winter coats in that heat was, for me, a torture. The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished, so their lunch break was short—fifteen or twenty minutes. They brought their own food: bunches of radishes, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables.
~ Arthur Miller, Before Air-Conditioning (The New Yorker, June 22, 1998)
Notes:
- *Inspired by temperature now in Dallas, TX: 103° F and Rising!
- Photo: Radishes by El Oso Botas. “Madrid-based, Guatemala-born and raised, photographer, food stylist, chef and digital content creator. I’ve had a keen interest in art, colours, and shapes since I was a child.” More photographs here.
