“When August rolls around, I start feeling the month-long equivalent of the Sunday scaries.”
It happens to me every year: August rolls around and I start feeling the month-long equivalent of the Sunday scaries. Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer that Nat King Cole sang about are ending — and the older I get, the faster those days seem to go. My end-of-summer blues are no longer ameliorated by the back-to-school excitement that comes with cooler nights and the sudden blush on my cone hydrangeas. Instead, I want to scream to Mother Nature, “Make it stop!!!”
Until recently, I wasn’t exactly sure why this season was the highlight of my year, and I started wondering why. Then my friend Nancy sent me a podcast by the Hidden Brain featuring an interview with a psychologist named Fred Bryant from Loyola University in Chicago. He talked about the power of slowing down and savoring simple pleasures as a way of capturing daily joy, even staving off depression and anxiety. As I listened, I channeled my inner Henry Higgins exclaiming, “By George, I think he’s got it! This is why I love summer!”
It seems my summers are filled with more of those “simple pleasures” than other seasons.
Plucking a perfect sun gold tomato from the vine in my vegetable garden, rubbing it on my shorts and popping it in my mouth. Admiring a perfect cafe au lait dahlia, cutting it carefully, and putting the single bloom in an antique bottle. Stopping in my tracks to watch an iridescent hummingbird inhaling the nectar from a delphinium before quickly buzzing away. A morning walk, peering out at the horizon to see a whale exhale a spout of mist. Watching the sunrise in Northern Michigan with friends I’ve known since I was a kid while singing the Folgers jingle. Waking up and having coffee with my mother-in-law in her Aspen kitchen. My morning ritual of coffee and bagels at Goldberg’s near my Hamptons home. (Gosh, I really love coffee!) Getting lost in a good book during golden hour at the beach as people pack their things and head home. And, of course, taking a perfectly ripe, soft but not too soft tomato that would put its store-bought counterpart to shame, slicing it in big fleshy circles, placing it on white bread with mayonnaise, sprinkling it with salt and pepper, and serving it up to a happy customer. (I particularly enjoyed introducing these to tomato sandwich neophytes and watching their delight as they took their first bite.) Needless to say, I enjoyed several myself and only occasionally succumbed to the lure of bacon, lettuce, and toasted bread.
If this isn’t savoring simple pleasures, I don’t know what is.
I am going to try to bring the wonder I feel during June, July, and August into autumn by slowing down when I pass a bodega teaming with chrysanthemums, taking in the magenta maple tree as I walk in Central Park, picking that perfect honey-crisp apple, or gazing at the first silent snowfall outside my window. Because savoring doesn’t have to end just because summer is over. Simple pleasures can be found all year long.
