Summer Is Not Over.

Summer isn't over! Yes, I'm wearing more clothes at this very moment than a rugged mountain man might wear in mid-October in Montana. (Remember socks?!? They're so April 2009!) A farmer at Added Value expressed to me that summer was already far behind him, a piece of fluff in a dryer vent. (Like compost, I amended and ameliorated that last part.) I disagree, vehemently! I present you with cold, hard, proof that summer is not over yet.

Exhibit A: The Calendar. Summer does not officially end until September 22. This should be enough to convince the reader that I am right and the farmer is dead wrong. Nonetheless, the following points serve to illuminate summery season signifiers from the LAST TWO WEEKS. Does this look like autumn to you?

• I didn't think so. This is what sunset looks like in summer: golden glow. The sun's heading down, but against her will. She wants to stay and play, so she lingers for as long as possible.

• This is me teaching teenagers about honeybees, surprised by how competent I sound on the subject. Do you see a classroom? No. Because its summer vacation.

Some responses from teens:

-To the drone's loss of genitalia and life when he mates with the queen: "Yo, why she gotta do that?"

-In response to the honey-tasting portion of the lesson: "I'm gonna get diabetes from this."

-To the fact that the worker bees, the majority of the hive, are all female: "That's sexist!"

-Student: "Is this a picture of you as a little girl?" Me: "No, that's a picture of me from March."

• My original intention was to find out the name of this flower and it's growing season to prove that it is still summer. However, technology has, once again, failed to live up to my genius ideas, and there exists no contraption wherefore to download this photo into a flower database and retrieve its common name.

I like to know the names of things, which is why I have been compiling my own flower database of sorts, that will go up once I identify some of the tricky ones with my team of experts. (My dad.) Once I find out the name I will revise this post and thus strengthen my argument! Wha-ha-ha-ha!

• Picnics. Need I say more?

Yes, you say? Fine. Would an elderly painter set up shop outside if there were the chance of catching a chill? I think not.

Whoa, elderly painter 1-2 punch!

• This delectable nectarine, sweet with tangy juices, was grown locally. Booyah.
  

I think I've made my point loud and clear: don't believe the farmer when he tells you summer is dead and gone. Let's not mourn just yet. We've still got some fire in us, don't we? 'Cause if being pumped and rearing to go is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

I've decided to form a team called Summerbusters, made up of highly skilled funsultants with can-do spirits. Don't you want to be somebody's funhero in these waning days of summer? (Funshero if you're a girl.) Delivering 100% pure fun to whomever is lucky enough to hang out with us, bustin' out the funglasses like it's nobody's biznass, you know, normal funsultant work. (Contact me for an application.)

Ode to New York City Summers

Even though your humid skies sag like wet diapers, I love you, New York City summertime. Thick, lukewarm air spits through the fan in my uptown apartment, mocking the archaic mechanism. Existence alone is cause for perspiration. Lady Liberty exemplifies the obstinate disregard for sweat that we New Yorkers must adopt.

I believe your subways are more conducive to men in heavy wool business suits than urban farmers in cutoffs and tank tops; they blast sterile bursts of cold air through loud AC systems and force me into the fetal position. (Although I must admit, your icy embrace has prevented me from waking up in the Bronx or Queens on several occasions.)

Girls have never been prettier than they are when they are walking down your streets in August drinking 40s in coffee cups.

Your expansiveness is overwhelming. Your opportunities are so numerous that they inspire guilt in those who fail to take full advantage of them.

Your summers illuminate little-known details that would be hastily ignored in meaner weather.

There's nothing like drinking a cold, locally-brewed beer on your Red Hook roof deck, New York. It can be a mystical experience.

View of you from Governor's Island:

View of you from Queens:

View of you from inside:

You're beautiful, New York City, no buts about it!

The reason I love you the most, though, is because you are a grown-up playground that brings friends together.

Savage Nature

I believe that if I live seasonally, in the way Ma Nature intends the rest of the organic world to live, I will be altogether better. Bountiful, beautiful, bright-eyed summer will find me indulging in juicy watermelon and cool green honeydew, laughing with my silly friends, and splashing around in pools, lakes, oceans and rivers alike. I'll bust out the running man with the no-nonsense enthusiasm of a lemon cucumber vine spitting out yellow, tennis-ball-ish fruit; the butterfly will burst from my crazy legz like a million purple string beans.

During the indian summer, I'll begin to reflect on the untamed euphoria of previous months; the trees will turn fiery and I'll eat fresh pumpkin bread to fatten up for the oncoming winter, during which I will essentially hibernate. Springtime, that magical season of hope and promise, will provide me with the first asparagus of the season, crisp and sweet, and embrace me with happy yellow daffodils and joyful pink tulips. Then it'll start all over again: excess, reflection, rest, growth, repeat. If I could discipline my body and mind to respect this archetypal cycle, I believe I'd be a more productive, happier, healthier person.

2009 has afforded me the oft-forgotten luxury of rolling with the tides, as they say. No obsessive planning. No lofty schemes. I've barely made a decision; decisions have presented themselves in front of me as if to say "I am the only logical choice." I drifted into the cycle in March, that temperamental lamb-beast, and I've cycled through as beekeeper, then writer, then farmer, all the way into the heart of August.

Keeping bees, working on a farm, and writing share a common denominator: the beekeeper, the farmer, and the writer rely on that which is natural and wild to be natural and wild, while attempting to contain the naturalness and wildness within an imposed structure. We must work with nature-- the hive mind, the harvest cycle, the unbridled idea--and manipulate it to produce our intended outcome. (Do I sound Romantic yet?)

From Andre Gide's The Immoralist:

"I marveled at the serene future promised by those robust oxen, those fat cows in their opulent pastures.

Secret treasure, Red Hook Community Farm

The apple trees planted in rows on the favorable hillsides heralded a splendid crop that summer;

First local heirlooms of the season, Union Square Greenmarket

I dreamed of the rich burden of fruit beneath which their branches would soon be bending.

NYC tomatoes sans blight (so far)

From this orderly abundance, from this happy subservience, from this smiling cultivation, a harmony was being wrought,

Little Shop of Horrors collard greens, Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

no longer fortuitous but imposed, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural,

Rooftop hive in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

in which one could no longer tell what was most admirable, so intimately united into a perfect understanding were the fecund explosion of free nature and man's skillful effort to order it.

Morning light at Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

What would that effort be, I thought, without the savage mastery it masters?

Bed prep at Added Value's farm on Governor's Island

What would be the savage energy of that overflowing sap without the intelligent effort which channels and discharges it, laughing, into profusion?"

Man mastering savage nature in Brooklyn