Seasonal Gloom

The summer is waning, although here in San Francisco it's hard to tell. August is always the foggiest month, and this year seems worse than ever. Especially as we live near the ocean--we can walk to the beach, although we rarely do--the days are swathed in damp white whirls of moisture that pushes into houses and cars and people and dogs by a biting wind.

The other day I realized that this was the first summer of my life that I stayed in the state where I live for the entire summer. Now, I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure that even as a baby my parents swaddled me up and whisked me off from our home in upstate New York to visit my grandparents in Berkeley and Los Angeles. And later there are pictures of me grinning toothlessly from a portable crib under an umbrella on the beach on Cape Cod. Then there are the summer-after-summer memories of that drive, my sister and me rolling freely on the bench seat of the station wagon, knowing we were getting closer when we saw sand on the edges of the road. Later on, when I was in high school, we started going to Nantucket from our new home outside Baltimore, adding miles and a ferry trip to the journey. But I never minded because Nantucket was nirvana, with its adorable shops, delectable ice cream shops and restaurants, and best of all, the freedom to walk downtown at night to meet boys.

But this year, our family elected to spend one week together in the Sierras, four hours away, and then Matt and his dad went backpacking in the high country in an even more remote spot. I whipped down to Orange County for a day-and-a-half with my best, dearest and still closest friend from college, Wendy, and 13-year-old Annie and I had a two-day respite in Napa while the boys were gone. All of these mini-trips were fun, but here it is, still more than a week until September, and I've had it with summer. Every day that dawns foggy, I feel grumpy, relishing the warmth of the yoga studio and wishing for the sun. I've looked into going back to Napa, but since we spent most of our "staycation" redoing our living room, having the windows washed, and other expensive house projects, there's no way we can afford a resort. I've given serious thought to begging my acquaintance with the second home in St. Helen to let us camp out in her pool house (I'm not too picky at this point), but my pride would suffer. I've hinted to Annie that if she gets invited to stay with her friend in Napa, I'd be happy to drive up and spend the day, but instead the friend's mother wanted us to keep her daughter with us in the city. Talk about plans backfiring.

So here I am, gazing out my office window at the gray sky and the green leaves quivering in the breeze, the tan on my forearms fading more each day, waiting for sunny September which always happens, forcing the kids back to school to sweat in their uniform blazers, allowing me to sit on the back deck off the bedroom resurrecting that unhealthy tan for just a few more weeks, eating the last of the heirloom tomatoes and nectarines, and buying boots and cashmere sweaters that I won't be able to wear until November, by which I will surely be ready for fall.