My natural response to the end of summer is to lament the loss of daylight as the nights slowly start drawing in earlier and earlier. This year feels different. After the gnawing anxiety of relentless heat with an unusual humidity and stickiness, the earlier descent of nighttime feels like being rescued. There’s something reassuring about life returning to a normal (habitable?) temperature, even though the grass has been turned to a brittle straw flattened onto a dusty ground.
There’s an old song by a folksy band that my Dad used to love, called ‘Red Rubber Ball’, which goes, “and I think it’s gonna be alright, yeah, the worst is over now. The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball”. I kept humming it to myself the day after the eclipse and all the sunset photos of it, but the line seemed to contradict itself. If the sun is shining that intensely, maybe it’s not going to be alright at all?
However…
With the hunkering down of autumn and winter, the ‘batten down the hatches’ approach when wind and rain howl and bucket down outside there’s a chance to re-group. It’s an opportunity to seek out hope and examine it, make friends with it, hang out and discuss old times until there’s a glimmer of something valuable to hold and protect. That’s where the building from a strong foundation begins for me. I have to gather my things, sit at my desk in shoes I can’t walk in but that make me feel more alive and write lists.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh* put it as:
