Gone To The Beach: The great "gifts" of Summer

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The great "gifts" of Summer

The days are long and hot, the flowers are in their most splendid blooming.

Daylillies! They bloom a few weeks "late" here at the beach. When I was a little girl back home in Illinois the daylillies bloomed for the Fourth of July.

The orange trumpets and chartreuse leaves filled the roadsides, along with huge drifts of blue-sky chicory. We considered them wildflowers and to this day I do not know if they were naturalized garden flowers (lilies run wild! LOL!) or if the native American wildflower was so beautful it was cultivated and hybridized into a Victorian garden plant.

Daylilies were so treasured by my family that my grandmother made an appliqued Daylilies Quilt, an heirloom I still own and treasure. My dad remembered going with her to the Five and Dime---Eckert's?---to buy the printed muslin blocks each week with the pennies she'd save shopping thriftily.

And when my dad built his Cape Cod greyshingled cottage, he planted the roadside again with daylilies...backed by grey fences laden with pink wild roses and lavender.

We get our blues from hydrangeas now...

...no wild blue chicory or Queen Anne's Lace here at the beach (though you can buy QAL for $12.oo at the market, geez...).

This is an excerpt from my favorite Cape Cod writer, North Cairn, writing about the glory of hot summer days:

"That’s one of the great gifts of summer, isn’t it, that sense of total abandon. No standing on ceremony when the temperature and humidity hit 90. No standing on anything.You either dive into the surf, lounge on the sand or loll on the living room floor. It’s all worth it in the end, with the long, slow sunsets, the milky twilight and the sleep that comes at last.

There is no relaxation quite like the torpor of summer, no matter where you live.... Peace comes or eludes everyone in turn, in due time.You just have to rest in the moment and let the transformation begin.