The Incredible Thickness of Summer Nights
I can't resist going outside on summer nights.
No matter how old I grow, on summer nights, I am seventeen again, pressing my face to the thick air, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the cacophony of insects that create a din where in winter there is only silence and cold. The cold sometimes creates a sound that is not a sound, but more a feeling.
The trees rustle where the boughs meet fifty feet above my head. I wonder who planted these trees or if they planted themselves. I wonder if the trees will still be here after I am gone from this place, and I am certain they will be. The trees don't care about my business. They'll offer shelter and shade to anyone and no one.
Summer nights convince me that I could walk away into them, walk for miles into their thickness and here on the edge of town I could disappear into the thickets where the deer live and the coyotes howl, pressing against the edge of the house rows. They ignore our presence and continue to be wild at the edge of it.
Once in high school I took a walk late on a summer night along the edge of a highway and out in the fields farmed by my relatives, I saw a million fireflies light up all at the same time. That they did that every night, that they still do that every night while I am sleeping or watching Netflix continues to center me and remind me that my little melodramas bloom and fade away like fireworks against their continuing thick summer night sky.
On summer nights, my favorite authors sat and thought and looked at similar fireflies and wrote their words, and sometimes I write some words, too, watching them explode against the screen before they fade away into the raging river of social media.
And I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour, and also comforted by it, because I am only just beginning to discover what so many more humans have known before me.
At my aunt's funeral last weekend, I remembered a documentary I saw about elephant mourning. Elephants are very intelligent, and when one of them falls, the herd gathers around it and touches it, sometimes moving to bury it under tree branches. They have even been known to do this for people. As I sat in the pew with tears streaming down my cheeks, I mourned my aunt who has been gone as I know her for years, taken by Pick's disease, but if I had a trunk, I would have raised it in respect for the woman I knew.
When I am gone, I would like an elephant funeral on a thick summer night.
Outside, listening to the tree frogs and the owls and the night creatures going about their business, I realize again how silly my ego really is. I can strive to scratch against the surface that is history, but ultimately a wayward star can erase not only me but every human who came before me and would come after. It's a scary thought, but also an oddly comforting one. I am all of it; I am none of it. The only thing that matters, ultimately, is how I treat people while I am here.
When we're gone, people don't remember so much what we said or what we did, but how we made them feel. We store that feeling with smells and tastes down in the animal portion of our brains, so much that when I cracked open an old book of nursery rhymes my grandmother used to read me, I heard her voice and initially thought I was being visited by a ghost before I realized this was my brain at work, my memory associating her gentle tenor with the words on the page.
On all summer nights, if I am alone and the air is right, I am seventeen and there are millions of fireflies hovering above the cornfields. I am seventeen and I will be someone and I will conquer the world and people will remember my name.