Inky Afternoons

New York is stepping into summer in classic fashion: heat wave.

Temps? Nineties. Heat index? Hundreds. Chance of a good hair day? Zero.

I used to bemoan New York summers, especially these kind of days, the ones where it’s stifling by 7am. And while I still catch myself whining, it’s mostly because I go into small talk auto-pilot when someone says, “whew, hot one today!” in the elevator.

The truth is, I’ve quit minding summers. Not because I particularly relish the sticky, smelly heat of the city from June through September.

But because life seems too short and unpredictable to be constantly wishing for the next season, the better season, the trip to a place with better weather.

In the past couple years, I’ve gotten a bit better at “being here, now.” Figuring out how to enjoy this moment. To find delights hidden in any forecast, in every season. Even summer in Manhattan.

No, it’s not particularly comfortable outside. I don’t step outside into the thick air that smells a bit like hot garbage and think, “Now this is nice!” I’m not Pollyanna.

But there are sneaky, other joys if I look for them.

The fact that that for a few months, the city is already awash in morning twilight when we start the coffee at 5am.

Entering a revolving door in swampy heat and exiting into the refreshing bite of my apartment lobby’s air-conditioning. The shock to the system. The respite of home.

The threat/promise of a summer thunderstorm. The kind that are either a doozy or not-at-all, and you likely won’t know which until you’re caught in one.

That said…

All my big talk about making peace with the weather aside, I mostly hibernate in summer. The way some hunker down in winter until the thaw, I go mostly underground in summer and emerge when it’s time to wear boots again.

Which means that summer tends to be an incredibly creative time for me. That’s perhaps an odd thing to say, since I’m a professional creative. Ideally all times are at least a little creative for me, and when they’re not I’m in trouble.

But summer is different. Even though I don’t have kids or head to the beach for the season, I’m not immune to summer vacation energy. Work hours shorten. Productivity seems somehow less the point of it all. When June hits, my creative pursuits skew more recreational than professional. Neglected art supplies come out, screens go away. My email inbox grows fat, but so does my sketchbook. The first from neglect, the second from little bursts of wobbly artist bravery.

A legacy from the summer of 2020. That strange, surreal time when it hit all of us that the COVID lockdown wasn’t merely a little spring blip. With no end in sight, I, like many of people, had to create new ways to fill the days.

For some it was making sourdough, for me, it was eating store bought sourdough, and dabbling with watercolor. I didn’t take to that particular medium—too imprecise—but I did fall in love with the process of creating something that I didn’t have to worry about making marketable. Of spending countless hours on something that would never become a side hustle.

Even more, I fell in love with the tactile. Of rediscovering the sensation of tools other than electronics beneath my fingers. My iPad Pro is one of my favorite and most used possessions, but I’ll take the scratch and flow of a real pen and real paper every time. Procreate’s a pretty cool app, but it can’t beat the satisfaction of painstakingly drawing a crooked tree on a blank page, even with smudged ink. Especially with smudged ink.

And so the long summer days begin.

The ever-more challenging quest to be out of bed before the first hint of dawn. Leisurely conversations over coffee as Anth and I muse whether this will be the day we finally figure out, what’s next, what are we doing, where are we going.

Maybe, maybe not.

But in the mean time, it’s ink-stained fingers, and fresh notebooks. Flowers doodled in margins. A new pen I probably did not need. Nectarines I ate a day before they were perfectly juicy because I couldn’t wait. A glass of ice cold rosé, dinner of tinned fish and baby carrots, because why not. Jazz. Frizzy hair. Linen everything.

And if I’m lucky, a summer storm.