Bracing for summer
The inevitability of everything
Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, and that means summer is, inevitably, upon us.
When I was in my 20s or even 30s, I didn’t think much about the comings and goings of seasons.
There had been many springs; there would be many more. The approach of summer meant scrambling for camps and childcare; fall meant checking school supply lists and, usually, buying things before I realized I already had five of them in a drawer somewhere.
But now, these seasons feel less expendable.
The boys are taller. The fawn-colored dog is moving more slowly than she was last year, and sprouting whiter hairs.
I feel the same as I did in my 20s, most days. But then there are the mornings that I, too, wake up a little more slowly, with a mysterious ache in one of my feet, or a subtle new crease emerging at the corner of my mouth. Where did that come from?
My husband, who is a bit older (he came across the word “zaddy” the other day and I had to tell him…), told me that after 40, things start to subtly change. He has more energy than me most days, despite the age gap, but he’s got more than a decade on me. And he’s warned me that with time, Tylenol will become your friend and almost everyone will need reading glasses at some point.
Despite what I like to imagine, there is no face cream or exercise regime that will keep me 23, no amount of savoring and cuddling that will keep my boys little, and no amount of love that will keep friends and loved ones from dying. We’ve recently been in a strange, sad season of friends - not young, but not old enough - who’ve moved on too soon.
We were walking through our neighborhood after a storm the other day, and I saw magnolia petals scattered across a lawn. It’s only May. Too soon.
But it’s part of life. Some things are inevitable, sooner or later.
Like “the turnings of the seasons and the earth,” as a line in an old First Call song said (iykyk but you probably don’t and that’s fine)…
Speaking of things that probably seemed inevitable to many, last week I covered the news that Nikki Haley says she will vote for former President Donald Trump, at least in her capacity as a voter. It wasn’t a full-throated endorsement, but it seemed to do the job; Trump said soon after that he would likely have a place for her in his administration, if he’s re-elected.
A few other things I’ve been working on:
My longer conversation with colleagues Mara Liasson and Franco Ordonez for the NPR Politics Podcast on Haley’s plans to vote for Trump.
Haley visits Israel, days after announcing her intention to vote for Trump.
I reported on what appears to be a growing movement of anti-abortion activists who describe themselves as “abolitionists”: they want to abolish all abortions, charge women who have them with murder, and ban IVF.
Colleague Domenico Montanaro and I chatted about how voters are viewing abortion, and the ways both Trump and President Biden have shifted their messaging on the issue over time.
I chatted with former NPR correspondent Mike Pesca about my book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. Mike is a fantastic interviewer and it was a lively conversation.
And some other exciting things I can’t discuss but will soon!
Also, I’m still doing book events! They are more scattershot now that the official tours have ended, but I’m looking forward to events at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco next month, and North Carolina in June and again in July for the Wild Goose Festival, and a few more in September.
Please feel free to reach out if you’re looking for an event speaker: sarahmccammonwriter@gmail.com.
Wendell Berry wrote the following in a short story called “The Rainbow,” and I want to quote the whole paragraph because it’s relevant to the initial feelings you expressed regarding the passage of time. Nevertheless I want to emphasize that the writing is his, not mine:
“We arrive here in the world having forgotten where we came from, though something of a memory seems to remain: a whisper, a distant shine like that of a house window at night on the far side of the valley, perhaps what some have called ‘the inner light,’ to guide us when finally we have been jolted awake. And so we don’t come from nothing. But once here we don’t know where we are. At first I learned the world as a book written, completed the day before my birth, not to be changed by another penstroke. And then I saw that some I knew were departing from it, never to return, and new strangers were arriving. The newcomers, if they stayed, would learn more or less of where they were. And then, in time, they too would depart, taking with them the sum of all they had learned, leaving behind them maybe a few who would remember them, and then the rememberers too would go and be gone. I see in this the order of things, nothing to complain about. I have been here long enough to watch the whole turn of the wheel. I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth. A far cry from a written book, the world—to extend my desperate metaphor—is a book ceaselessly being written, and not in a human language. This too has not been submitted to our judgement, and it is not for us to regret. To give thanks seems truly to be the right response, for as we come and go we learn something of love, the gift and the giving of it, and this appears to lay a worth upon us, if we want it, if we accept it, to give us standing hereafter.”
Still planning to do a book event in the Boston area in September? 🤞