Full summer has come to the North Country. 90-degrees and sticky days.

Raised in the semi-arid West, I have never fully acclimated to humidity. To heat that stays around even after the sun goes down, and to shade that does not cool you down. I grew up in houses without air-conditioning and now cannot imagine living without it.

Late Middle-Age brings on a nostalgia. You find events that happened decades ago coming and going unbidden. The face of a long-gone relative, a familiar house at the end of a country road, long-gone turtles sunning themselves on a log in the middle of a trout pond, the taste of an orange popsicle.

When you are young, you are always looking forward: to school starting, to Christmas, to your birthday, to turning 13, then 18, then 21. And since you are always looking forward, and all patterns and things are new to you, time moves slow and slower.

As you age, though, there is more and more weight to things behind you and to the things you have known. You turn your head more and more often toward the past, less and less toward the things ahead.

I imagine at times that for the dying, the “light” so many report seeing at the end of days is really just the light of some wonderful summer day from their past calling. And “letting go” is really just  surrendering to the gravity of memory that has become too heavy to keep carrying forward.