The Last Days of Summer

All over Alaska there is an iconic plant called fireweed. The bright magenta flowers start blooming low on the stalk, and throughout the short summer season, the blossoms move up the plant. When the last buds at the top begin to flower, Alaskans say the summer is over.

On our recent vacation to the 49th state, we discovered that summer was indeed almost over, shifting into fall daily, even hourly. Restaurants and coffee shops and inns were starting to close up for the season. Dusk came earlier, dawn came later, the fireweed flowers waving merrily all over the glorious expansive landscape. A thorn bird singing its last goodbye.

Of course, I didn’t need the fireweed to tell me the season was turning. In all the ways that matter, summer is over.

Summers in the Ten Thousand Stars Piano Studio have a certain rhythm. After the celebratory studio recital in late May, we go on hiatus for a couple of weeks, and then summer lessons fill June and July days. There is the Quintessence choral festival in mid-July, which has its own shifting meter and tempo. I rush to put together a school year schedule before I go on August break. And then, school starts and it all begins again. Summer is over.

Or so I was telling my friend Lora over drinks one night a few weeks ago. It was the liminal time between the summer lesson semester and our much-anticipated vacation to Alaska. I had some precious days off before we left town and I was seeing friends and swimming extra laps and doing a deep dive of sorting and cleaning, weeding and watering in the house and garden. “Basically,” I told Lora as we sifted through the debris of our days and doings over wine, “summer is over.” 

She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Amy, you know there are two more months of summer, right?”

“Yeah, but…” I started to argue but then stopped myself. Lora has a normal job, not tied to either the restrictions or the rhythms of the school calendar. With the temperatures still soaring to the mid 90s most days, she would never accept that summer was over. She had a point, really.

It was on the heels of this conversation that Matt and I got on a plane heading north. We have dear friends who own a cottage in Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula. For several years Craig and James have been inviting us to come visit. Last summer, in the middle of an interminable stretch of 98-degree days, I said to Matt, “I cannot spend another entire summer in New Mexico.” I’m pretty sure I was in tears of desperation when I announced this.

En route to Alaska, we stopped in Seattle and spent a couple of days with a dear former student, her husband and baby, exploring the city during an unexpected heat wave. The days of sunlight were long; the heat smothering. I had packed layers for all kinds of weather situations, but I wore only my basic black bottom layer of clothes, the cute colorful—but too warm!—accents left in the suitcase. In Seattle, it was definitely still summer. Then we boarded a plane to Anchorage.

We stepped out of the airport into a rainy, grey, cold afternoon. As we got into the car, our Uber driver told us, “Summer is over. Fall is here.” We checked into a small inn near the harbor, grabbed an umbrella and went out in search of soup and whiskeys. Fall had begun.

Alaska does seasons on steroids. Summers are intense, the days of daylight stretch forever, the gardens ramp up into high-speed to take advantage of the endless sunlight. The tourist season is abbreviated and condensed to a few short months, while the locals come out of hibernation and work and play with reckless abandon.

We took the cue. For ten days we found ourselves chasing the end of summer, the last of the fireweed blooms, the elusive Northern Lights and all the wildlife we could spot in that big beautiful state. We hiked to glaciers, sea kayaked across the bay, watched for whales in the fjords, biked along the Homer spit, walked on the beach, tracked the tides, and ate seafood with abandon. We saw moose and mountain goats, sea otters and river otters, sea lions and porpoises, a smack of jellyfish, two kinds of puffins and dozens of bald eagles (who knew that in Alaska they were practically as common as pigeons?). We played cards and had long meandering conversations over gin and tonics and lingering dinners of soup and salad greens. We took ten thousand photos and averaged 13,000 steps a day.

Sadly, we never saw a whale. Or a bear. Or the Northern Lights for that matter.

But almost every single day, someone we encountered pointed out the status of the fireweed. “Have you seen the fireweed? Summer is over.”

Alaska is exotic, wild, spectacularly gorgeous. It is a study in contrasts: I waded in the water along beaches surrounded by mountains covered in snow. There are booths with animal pelts at the farmers' market; at the same time, Homer is famous for its peonies and dahlias sold in stalls around town. Native Alaskans are happy to have a moose in the freezer to get them through the winter, while many restaurants boast plenty of vegan options on their menus. It is a practice of learning to live within an extreme imbalance: the long extraverted summer days, the dark introverted winter months. Feast or famine. All or nothing.

There’s a lesson there to ponder, I think, as I return to a life built around practice and discipline, balance and moderation, constancy and consistency. Perhaps graceful living means leaning into the season at hand with all its extraordinary possibilities, perfectly precarious balance be damned. It might mean too much soup in the winter, too many tomato sandwiches in the summer. It might mean extra laps in the pool during heat waves, more yoga classes during spring windstorms. It means enjoying a less demanding practice schedule in between gigs and adding hours on the piano bench during crunch times. It means walks to the new ice cream shop to meet friends on empty August evenings and solitary walks under the stars after a day of teaching on school days.

Back at home in the fierce New Mexican landscape, we’ve had our own desert thorn bird to remind us of the truth of impermanence. Agave cactus, or century plants, bloom once in their lifetimes, sending up a tall stalk that branches out into spikey yellow flowers. The species survives by creating baby cactus that surround the mother plant before her last dying act. Years ago, the agave next to the front door celebrated its last days with a green shoot that stood higher than our roof. We replanted its many babies around the garden, and this summer, one of the babies sung its final swan song. It was miraculous to watch the stalk shoot upwards, growing inches every day. From my teaching chair, I could measure its growth against the courtyard wall, the visual evidence that everything in this fragile world changes and shifts. As the Buddhist teachings tell us, suffering occurs when we hang on to the hope that things will stay the same. Like the flowers on the vibrant flaming fireweed, inner peace comes with learning to let go gracefully, embracing the present and surrendering to the ever-shifting reality around us. “Spend the afternoon,” Annie Dillard tells us. “You can’t take it with you.”

It’s something to think about as the season rolls out before us. Already the fall calendar is stuffed with studio classes and concerts, rehearsals and lessons. This is not our first rodeo, Matt and I tell each other, as we compare schedules and scribble down obligations. Inevitably in the weeks and months ahead, as work and life threaten to topple us sideways, we will lose and regain balance over and over again. Hopefully with some new-found reckless abandon.

Yesterday, I was doing my morning yoga when out of the corner of my eye I saw out the sunroom door not one, not two, not three, but FOUR raccoons strolling nonchalantly down the driveway. Earlier this summer a fox visited the cats every morning at dawn, the critters eyeing each other curiously through the screen doors. “It’s Wild Kingdom around here,” Matt said. Who needs to go to Alaska? We have everything we need right here.

Meanwhile, friends, just to be clear: summer is over.