Hello, hello, good morning!
I feel a bit like a toad crawling out of a muddy hole to (sheepishly, but joyfully) croak, I’m still here! In my last notes dispatch, I shouted the same message from the rim of a metaphorical canyon; this felt fitting because April still felt like isolation. Like there was still great space between us.
Three months later, we’ve made contact: with the earth, and, if we’re lucky, with each other’s actual, physical forms. We’ve hugged each other at outdoor weddings, or felt our knees bump one another’s in river rafts. We’ve played and rested and kept working but it’s been in the rapturous mud that is summer, where we allow ourselves to forget reality a little bit. More on that in a second.
How have you made contact these last three months? What has it felt like? Share a slice of your days, if you please 🍉
Summer person
Which is the season that makes you feel most like yourself? Mine is summer, when I can abandon shoes, eat peaches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and (because I love the heat) generally tangle myself up with nature at all hours of the day. (On a run earlier this week, I found myself gulping down so much air that I fully swallowed an enormous cloud of gnats.) I love August especially, where there is a swollen quality to the air that reminds me how alive the earth is. If summer is also your season: keep shining, baby!
The other reason I’ve always loved summer is thanks to a developing hypothesis I have: that it invites a collective suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a concept (stay with me) I learned doing theatre as a kid: “the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality.”
The concept is commonly applied to theatre because whenever we examine something unreal, like a work of fiction, our analytical mind kicks into gear, pointing out everything implausible about the invented reality. But when we view theatre, we’re asked to suspend that critical thinking and just let the unreal be possible. I think summer asks us to do the same thing.
As a kid, I spent a few magical July weeks at 4-Mile Historic Camp, described as a “portal to Denver’s Western heritage.” We would slip back in time to the 1800s and take part in life as it was for pioneers on the high plains: one-room schoolhouse lessons, daily farm chores, cooking over an open fire and (my favorite, obviously) panning for gold in the river. The experience stands out in my memory as one that inextricably linked the ritual of stepping outside your own reality with summer. The other is staying up all night to read the Harry Potter books, which were released every July between 1997 and 2000.
This summer, I’ve noticed my participation in a very specific suspension of disbelief: that the COVID-19 pandemic is mostly in the past. For the past few months, I’ve chosen to intentionally avoid the truth that the pandemic is still very much happening. And it’s no coincidence that my mental “pausing” of the pandemic has coincided with summer. Not only does summer allow such behavior, safely, by drawing us outside and encouraging our masks to come off—but summer is also an expert at letting us temporarily inhabit “something unreal” (in this case, life before a global pandemic).
I think we’ve all participated in this disbelief a little bit recently. And, like the first scent of fall in the air, news of the Delta variant has been a stirring reminder that reality is, in fact, still with us—even in spite of our choice to disbelieve.
Maybe one of the reasons I feel most myself during the summer is because the annual suspension of disbelief feels so necessary to being human, to existing in a complex world that requires critical thinking to successfully navigate. I don’t feel like myself without it; this yearly ritual of abandoning the logic that keeps me firing on all cylinders most of the year, in favor of letting the impossible feel real.
I hope this summer has brought a little bit of that feeling for you, a respite from a year that has otherwise continued to challenge us. Let’s squeeze as much juice as we can out of that feeling, in these last few weeks of summer. It’ll be a whole year before we get to do it again.
Wedding person
In July, Mike and I got married, surrounded by family in one of the most beautiful places on this earth! (Hawaii.) It was euphoric and overwhelming and I have many thoughts to share—coming soon. In the meantime, a few snapshots!
Joy blaaaast (📷 edition)
Cooks, reads, listens (📚 edition!)
Mike and I have been on the road again (more on that soon, too!), so “cooking” has mostly been mixing cashews and Dot’s pretzels in a cup followed by opening a bag of beef jerky … but reading has been at an all-time high!
I’ve loved four nonfiction reads recently, and while I could write a lot about each of them, I’ll give you a quick taste and request that you let me know immediately if you have read or plan to read any of them so we can discuss.
Unfollow, Megan Phelps-Roper. Memoir that chronicles growing up in an extremist Baptist Church in Topeka, and the moral awakening that encouraged her to leave. Could not put this down.
You’ll Grow Out of It, Jessi Klein. Essays by comedy writer and star of Big Mouth (a Netflix comedy I love very, very much) that had me straight-up laughing out loud.
The 2000s Made Me Gay, Grace Perry. Essays on pop culture by my brother’s college classmate, that set her coming-of-age and journey to queerness against the familiar The Real World, Mean Girls, Harry Potter. So smart and fun.
Thanks for Waiting, Doree Shafrir. Memoir that captures being a late bloomer, and asks the important question of why our culture idolizes hitting certain “adult” milestones by a certain age. Doree co-hosts the podcast Forever35 (also recommend).
A poem-share
I’m curious how you’ll interpret this favorite of mine, Poem After Summer, by Jasmine V. Bailey.
If I created a world I would call it Virginia and every so often it would rain. You and I would set decoys out in the lakes where they would float among the pinprick raindrops and the leaves that would settle after falling. Evenings, we would bring them in and scatter the geese from their flirting. We would understand everything about fall, like where it wanders and why the saddest books are always turned to then, the oldest poems. We would know why haikus arrange themselves in those little lines and why waltzes begin again at four, realize that to die is to forget the world and how all the heroes forgot us. We would set about forgetting peaches, knowing that is the best place to begin.
What is it that you’ll “set about forgetting” from this season, just so you can remember it again?
Becca
See the archive of these letters here, and unsubscribe from them here.
Woah, you picked like, actually the best time in all of 2021 to get married. Who knew that July was going to be the only month that COVID actually felt like it might be over, before Delta and Omicron rudely popped the bubble.