Reflection: On Entering Fall
Autumnal greetings! On a normal year, I’d have been prepping for the season in August, but living in the District has affected my perception of time so much that I hadn’t properly experienced summer. I grew pouty almost unwilling to accept its inevitable end — the five stages of grief and all that. At the beginning of this month, I traveled up to Shelter Island, New York, and then to my hometown of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, to visit family, and the sojourn settled my sorrows back down to a healthy amount. Such small-town excursions have a way of rebooting my mood.
Boats docked in Greenport
An Amtrak and LIRR double feature delivered me from sweltering Washington to cool Greenport’s maritime museum on Friday, Sept. 2. It was only my second trip out this summer, and I’d savor every minute of the little reality. I remembered to bring dollar bills and got a token to get on the ferry. The ferry is the best part (maybe I say this because I have yet to ride a sailboat): the salt air Taylor Swift has popularized (not an overrated quality), the foam bubbling beneath the vessel, the refracted light that jumps into squinted eyes as you lean over the edge to expand your view as much as possible. It’s best at golden hour, but any time of day will do, so long as the landscape is visible. The hope of the season, even if it’s at summer’s end, is all wrapped in the trip across the sound. The anticipation is life’s purpose in every aspect, isn’t it?
That typical summer exposition ends with the boat arriving at a sign: “North Ferry Co. Welcomes You to Shelter Island.” I made my way through a parking lot of weekenders to find my cousin who would drive us up to the house. This time, I’d be staying in a room I hadn’t yet before, with a connecting bathroom painted a calming terracotta, a reference to both summer flush and the turning leaves beyond the window.
The following days were accompanied by my cousins’ good cooking and hospitality, chilly windy beach days (I declined to swim this time), porch reading, and mourning the dried hydrangea bushes.
Here, life is slow, but the weekends expire fast. Like the cooled clump of wax left at the end of our candlelit dinner, the party was over, and it was time to head back to the city. I had a flight to catch to get to my parents’ house. Despite it all, however, I wasn’t sad. I wrote on the train back:
“I used to think like everyone else. I used to consider the westward LIRR routes a trip back to reality. But perhaps Shelter Island — with its egrets, sea foam, the summer cottages on Spring Garden, indigo hydrangea, pebbly beaches, minnows, and Augustine jellyfish — is the reality; and somehow that shift in perspective allows me to cherish it all the more and not to dread city weekdays. ‘I will return to New York and its weekends out east,’ I wrote on the train in July, ‘not if it kills me, but because the thought of such a swift homecoming is what keeps me alive.’”
There are countless realities to this universe, and each one is particular and personal. I live for these summer realities of mine, for the versions of them in novels, and in an unexpected turn they make me appreciate the other realities — Adams Morgan Sundays, ice skating in Montgomery County, rushing through New York with a heavy duffle bag, crushing one of thousands of lanternflies at the PPG Place in downtown Pittsburgh, extending my hometown stay to write in the café with the best chai lattes (which would surely prompt heavy-duty teeth-whitening sessions).
In a May Word document, I typed, “How do you fight the feeling that others are living a life that should be yours?” While I have no formal answer, I am glad not to be as sour as I had been.
