Now that my unemployment has an end date, I’m feeling the crunch of time. In a way, the past few months have been an experiment in perceptions of time: the endlessness of the last half of March, the instantaneousness of April and May, to the adaptation to this altered world and lifestyle that made summer months pass close to normally. With a few weeks remaining, time has suddenly started sprinting again.
As the countdown draws closer to that date circled on the calendar, the “oh shit” mentality has come on strong. A to-do list tacked up, post-its with rogue tasks stuck where I’ll hopefully notice them, and piles of work-related items dug out from the closet to be organized. Like years past, whether for the return to work or school, I’m feeling that same sense of urgency to tie up all the loose ends. Funny how I’ve had months to tackle projects, yet it’s the emergence of a deadline that’s spurred me into action.
Yet, despite all the things I’m scrambling to finish before work dominates my life, I’m not quite ready to let go of summer and its looseness of time. It feels like I’ve only just found the perfect blend of things to maximize warm sunny days: bike trails along the river, swimming downtown, walks to get soft serve, Sunday morning farmers’ market visits, sitting outside for hours at a time just reading… That sense of not having anywhere to be or anything that has to be done, to simply enjoy being outside on a beautiful day is really the thing I’m not quite ready to lose. Even as mid-September has ushered in cooler weather, I scan the weekly weather forecast, reserving the warmest or sunniest days to savor the last bits of summer and promising myself I’ll try to get as much checked off that to-do list on days when the weather is less sandals-accommodating.
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For me, the photos this week try to capture these small moments of the end of summer- a walk in the Botanic Garden, the growth of my back porch garden (my tomato plants are a bit ragged, but the fruit is finally ripening!), that warm glow of fading light as the sun sets earlier and earlier…
The other day, I was on the phone with someone from Apple tech support. When he learned I was in Chicago, he asked about Chicago sunsets, saying, that where he was, in Madison, Wisconsin, there had been remarkable sunsets as a byproduct of the wildfires out West. I thought of this yesterday, driving east as brilliant golden light, unfettered by clouds, bounced off the mirrors of my car and reflected onto my face (tried to take a photo on my phone at a red light, so it’s not the greatest quality). Turning north, I saw the perfect golden circle of the sun sitting lower in the cloudless, empty, hazy sky. It was a beautiful sight, a golden hour made for the end of summer.
As with the sunsets in Madison, I suspect this too owes something to the wildfires. It’s strange that this moment of intense beauty could have origins in something so devastating, but this idea of ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ co-existing within the same space or moment feels fitting for my experience over the past months. This has been (to use the most overstated phrase of 2020) an unprecedented time, one of tremendous tragedy and injustice. Yet, for the most part, my exposure to the worst remains confined to the news, instead of through personal experience. When I think of life on the macro scale (Chicago, the United States, the world), I’m filled with the heaviness of loss- the collective loss of life, of normalcy, of stability- as well as anger at leadership and systems whose callousness and broken frameworks have been so damaging. However, alongside this ‘bad,’ when I look to the most personal level, aspects of this time have provided opportunity for growth, of connecting to myself and to different communities in both real life and in digital spaces. I suppose everything “contains multitudes” - both positive and negative, even a sunset.