Basecamp Dispatch: Summer in the South

Summer has lain in here like a thick wool blanket. It’s the kind of heat that makes me grumpy, strains the thermostat, and makes me rearrange my schedule.

Penny and I have shifted our walks until after dark when it’s ever-so-slightly cooler. The garden has gone from “meh” to “holy cow that’s a lot of zucchini.” And I’ve spent more mornings than I’d like to admit reading in the glorious embrace of air conditioning.

Zucchini season has officially arrived! We basically went from “oh look, a little baby zucchini” to land squarely in the zone of “what am I supposed to do with twenty-seven of these?” I stopped some neighbors walking by yesterday and shoved a half dozen zucchini into their arms before they could get away.

In the South, if you accidentally leave your car unlocked overnight this time of year, you’ll wake up to find someone broke in and left a pile of zucchini in the passenger seat. Nobody needs that kind of vandalism.

I’m trying to sneak a little zucchini into every meal, which makes breakfast an adventure. Yesterday’s solution involved several loaves of zucchini bread. Tomorrow, it could be zucchini pancakes. I’ll let you know.

I pulled the last package of elk steaks from the freezer this week and cooked them up Hibachi style. I stood over the stove and popped the bites in my mouth like candy straight from the cast iron. I burned my tongue. But sometimes life is worth a little pain.

It tasted as good as I remembered. Maybe better. Which makes the whole thing that much worse.

There’s still elk burger and stew meat in the freezer, so all is not lost. It takes a while for a family to work its way through an entire elk, after all. But those steaks… Man, I’m gonna miss them.

I rendered another batch of bear fat this week. I’ve barely (bear-ly?) put a dent in my freezer stockpile. I’m thinking I’m going to have to start giving it away with the zucchini.

As Penny and I were leaving the house for one of our nightly walks, I noticed a cicada had climbed its way onto the cement steps. I figured it was just the casing, the chrysalis they leave behind when they come out of the ground and transform into the palm-size green bugs that scream about the heat from the oak trees in summer. My cousins and I used to throw them at each other in my grandparents’ yard when we were kids.

But when we got back, we found that the shell wasn’t empty. A giant emerald cicada was pushing itself out of that tiny shell, writhing and wiggling its way to freedom. Birth is hard. Even when you’re a bug.

I’ve lived in the South for more than half a century and never had the privilege of watching a cicada emerge from its shell. I’ve seen thousands of the empty casings clinging to trees and fence posts. Never the becoming.

I didn’t mean to spend June swimming in a bunch of other people’s writing. But here we are. One essay led to another until I realized I might have a problem.

I read them in the mornings over coffee, sometimes on the porch before the heat settles, while the hummingbirds bicker over the feeder. Other mornings it’s already too hot and I stretch out on the couch with the AC running.

Penny always bumps in close, asking for a very specific kind of attention that involves my fingernails and her backside. It’s a steady routine. Quiet and boring, which is probably why I enjoy it so much.

Here are three pieces that stayed with me long after I closed the tab.

Christine’s writing is hauntingly beautiful across the board, but this is one of her best. The line, “Until I find a better way to be human...” has been rattling around in my brain for days. It doesn’t read like philosophy. Instead, it feels more like permission to not be perfect, which is something I struggle with on the regular.

This one made me wish I were a bird hunter. It’s also a beautiful reminder that the hunt doesn’t have to be anything more than the hunt, and that success doesn’t have to be measured in productivity.

I’ve struggled to write about the weight of taking an animal for food without dressing it up or flattening the experience. This comes as close to truth as anything I’ve read.