Summer Solstice: An Essay

By Nina MacLaughlin

“A vivid contrast to this moment of masks: the immediacy of a season bursting out of itself, elemental and clean” from the acclaimed author of Wake, Siren (Portland Press Herald).

Summer is fireflies and sparklers. Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon—but they’re captured here, in loving sensuous prose that’s both personal and universal, for you to find any time of year.

Experience the most evocative tribute to the meaning of the season, a season whose magical feeling stays with us even in winter. Where does that feeling come from? What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. A crown you’ve made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing and sleeping with the windows open. This essay brims with a searching honesty and insight about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead.

Release yourself into the sky and feel, Nina MacLaughlin writes, for a moment: there’s time.

If summer is the season of your life, if the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day hold your favorite memories, you’ll love Summer Solstice.

“For those who cannot safely venture from their homes this season, MacLaughlin’s book can be that breath of fresh air, the nostalgic call back to better days, and the hope for a future when we can safely gather again under open sky . . . [Summer Solstice is] a brief reverie, short and sweet like the fleeting days it describes.” —Green Mountain Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781574232394

Nina MacLaughlin

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, and the companion to Winter Solstice, Black Sparrow’s Summer Solstice. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

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Also by Nina MacLaughlin

Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (2015)

Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (2019)

Summer Solstice title page

Published in 2020 by black sparrow press

David R. Godine, Publisher

15 Court Square, Suite 320

Boston, Massachusetts 02108

www.godine.com

Copyright 2020 © by Nina MacLaughlin

The four-part essay originally ran, in a slightly different form, online at The Paris Review Daily.

all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information, please write to the address above.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: MacLaughlin, Nina, author.

Title: Summer solstice : an essay / Nina MacLaughlin.

Description: Boston : Black Sparrow Press, 2020.

Identifiers: lccn 2019056172 | isbn 9781574232387 (paperback)

| isbn 9781574232394 (ebook)

Subjects: lcsh: Summer. | Summer solstice.

Classification: lcc ps509.S87 M33 2020 | ddc 813/.6--dc23

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056172

Contents

The Start of Summer

In Summer We’re Reborn

Fecund Sounds Like a Swear

Summer Is Made of the Memory of Summer

Afterword: A Last Tremble of the Wing

Addendum: Plant Matter

Works Cited

The Start of Summer

It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half:

On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw

6

shooting stars that night.

Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric mapmakers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are.

Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins on

Reviews for Summer Solstice

[lisapeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lovely little chapbook, inside and out. MacLaughlin's seasonal essays are one of my favorite things in the Paris Review, and it's nice to reread this on a sultry night a week after the solstice when summer is really settling in here on the East coast. A dear friend sent me this for my birthday last year and I read it but didn't record it; I think I was too unsettled to think about the seasons turning in 2020. This year I get it, and even though not all MacLaughlin's summer nostalgia hits the same notes for me—in the last essay she admits to not loving the summer, at least not in New York, and it made me smile—this is a real ripe peach of a book.