August 6, 2021: August Suspension -

It’s 64 degrees out and cloudy, which makes me wildly happy. Yesterday’s ominously orange hazy-sunlight is nowhere to be seen, and there aren’t any wildfires raging close to town. It’s perfect weather for getting something done, but I’m not sure what.

For a while now, I’ve felt suspended. I can’t quite explain the feeling, nor come up with one big reason for it. It’s a combination of things.

First, it’s August. It’s possible I have always felt suspended in August, anticipating the Back to School season, even when I wasn’t in school myself. Except I always was, one way or another. The year I graduated, I started teaching dance through the community college. The next year, I began a thirty year stint doing high school theater.  The day my own kid left for college, I auditioned for a fall term madrigal group.  As soon as I retired, I signed up for classes at PSU. My dance studio always went on vacation in August. My choir, pre-pandemic, had a calendar that mimicked the school year. We took summers off, and restarted in September.

August was always a between time, a little bittersweet because the freedom of summer was ending, but only a little. I enjoyed some parts of vacation, but I liked the school year better than summer, stimulation more than relaxation, social life more than hanging around the house.

So maybe August always feels to me like a pause before things start. And yes, I do have hopes of taking a class at PSU in the fall. And of taking dance class in 3-D, in a room big enough to dance in, surrounded by other dancers. And yoga, similarly.

But I don’t have high hopes. I have tentative hopes. And that’s the second reason I feel suspended – the delta variant and the spike in COVID cases, and all the uncertainty surrounding that situation. WILL there be in-person classes at PSU? WILL there be dance classes in a studio? In masks? WILL the yoga studio, which lost its retail space and became entirely online, find a new physical home?

There has been talk of reconvening the choir, or some mini-choirs, or something, in September. No details, but what with delta and masking mandates, and the special case that is singing-and-aerosols, choir may be paused for a while longer. I was interviewed for a profile in the choir newsletter yesterday, and when asked what my hopes were for September, I said, “I’m not letting myself hope. And I’m not being negative. I’m just suspended.”

And then there’s some other factor feeding into the feeling of time-suspended, something to do with summer weather, but not with summer versus the school year per se. It’s the Gather Ye Rosebuds aura that characterized summer 2020, the awareness that we should socialize outdoors while we may, because socializing indoors, come fall and winter, may not be wise. Again.  

I’ve been gathering those particular rosebuds like a madwoman – three outdoor lunches and one outdoor dinner with friends this week. After the last of those, I swung by the drugstore and bought a home COVID test. No reason, just I’d heard they were running out and it seemed like something a person would want to have in the medicine cupboard.

And then I saw that the lights in the Belmont branch of the library were on. I had read it would reopen in August, but I hadn’t seen any particular date mentioned. I nearly squealed the tires, pulling into the lot, and I ran inside. They said, “We close in five minutes,” and I said I know.  It felt weird, and good, to be back in there, real and dream-like.  It felt a little bit like the first day of school.