Whil'st Summer Lasts and I live Here (Cymbeline, IV, 2)

I will celebrate my first year of living in Jack London Square in September, making this summer the last season to experience for the first time as an Oaklander. But summer does not come. Summer cannot find me here in my new home. It has stopped raining. The days have grown longer, true. Temperatures have risen and continue to climb. But it is not summer. Now that it is the middle of July and the season is growing old, like me, I have to wonder if summer will come at all. I mean the feeling of summer; being aware of every day as a summer’s day—just the thought of it is so luxurious—the incredible light pouring over your hot, animal skin. That is what is not happening.
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If I have been robbed of summer, there are two prime suspects—becoming old and moving to a new home after 15 years of living in the same house. I have only within the last few weeks absorbed the emotional truth that the door to my youth has closed permanently behind me. I am in a new place: old. Though I can look back and still see those earlier years, they are like trees along the roadside, shrinking first to miniature as the distance between us grows and then they fall away entirely. I don’t know what lies ahead but one thing that is sure is that it will be different and I doubt that I’m as prepared as I tell myself I am. So it is possible that feelings of loss and the approach of a terrible uncertainty sap my attention away from the light, evening breeze through the leafy maples and the close, fat moon at night. I find the feeling impossible to describe. Not devastating or depressing but elegiac in a way so piercingly beautiful that I am not enough of an artist to be able to tell you what I feel. Perhaps I am too self-absorbed for summer to make itself known to me.
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Or, perhaps it is that for the first time in 17 years, I do not have a garden. As anyone who has worked the same patch of dirt continuously for more than a decade can tell you, a garden so deeply known becomes an internalized world moving in time with the universe. I saw my garden as the face of a living sundial—it told me unfailingly when winter had departed and then when spring had collapsed into the arms of summer. I tend nothing here except my spirit, as did Whitman, but I can still feel the old pull of languid afternoons in the slanting light of late August as the shadows crept toward us where we lay panting in the damp and twisted sheets.