The August Scaries

I see your photos of your European vacation, your cousin's wedding, your great summer adventures. Don't ask me to show you mine.

I looked up from my prone position on our living room couch Saturday night, glancing out at the medium-wash denim sky and noted, “it’s getting dark out.”

“I hate that,” I added.

“Yes, it’s not entirely dark out,” Jon pointed out. “And it is 8:30.”

“But still, it’s not light out either,” I said.

We both were right.

Today, a full six weeks after the Summer Solstice, I feel those additional minutes of darkness gaining on us in the form of increasingly later sunrises. It makes me feel like we’re ticking down to something…well, darker.

(Not dark like David Fincher dark; don’t worry, I’m not leading you to some kind of massive catastrophe that ends with Brad Pitt wailing, What’s in the box!)

We’re heading toward a time and place with fewer daylight hours, fewer opportunities for spontaneity, fewer moments of freedom and possibility.

Let’s call it, September.

August has always been a little tough for me, but I couldn’t quite give it a name until recently.

I have The August Scaries.

You know The Sunday Scaries, right?

There’s even a CBD Gummy brand called Sunday Scaries that cleverly brands itself as a solution to the solution to THE IRRATIONAL FEARS and INTERNAL DARKNESS THAT OVERCOME YOU on Sundays, when the IMPENDING DOOM of Monday is right around the corner.

(Uh, easy there marketers. Take a gummy. Chill a little. Also, I may need to order a bottle.)

While we mostly think of the Sunday Scaries as that uncomfortable combination of anxiousness and dread you feel as Monday approaches, I think there’s maybe a pinch of remorse somewhere lower on the ingredient list, with a sprinkling of modest regret.

Maybe you didn’t accomplish all the socializing or meal prep or bill-paying or low-impact socializing or hashtag-parentinggoals moments you had intended.

Maybe you even needed to do nothing, but in the end, let’s be honest: nothing doesn’t photograph all that well.

It certainly doesn’t hold up to your friend’s Instagram photos of Greece and Scotland, Barcelona’s Gaudi buildings and East Hampton’s beaches.

(Not that I’m jealous.)

(Okay, I’m jealous. But also very happy for you! But also jealous.)

So when I flipped the calendar page yesterday morning to August, just one more calendar page away from September, I saw my summer flash before me, Memento style—a quick-cut montage of all the great summer plans and dreams and “yes, let’s count on doing that!”…that never materialized.

Most boring montage ever.

Top top it off, Facebook will come along and serve me one of those photo-roulette memories from years ago on this date so I can think, oh look at that cool thing we were doing on that summer day that we are not doing on this summer day with only a few weeks left to go.

And then…it will be September.

Bleh.

The August Scaries.

Indeed, it’s been a weird few months. So I’m trying not to beat myself up over what I did (or didn’t do) in May and June and July and what I will or won’t have time to do before September hits.

It’s been a period of massive transition, filled with far more of those tedious grownup responsibilities than one would normally hope for; and a lot of those appropriately grownup decisions, like staying close to home this summer in case any of our overnight campers needed us.

I don't regret any of the choices we’ve made, but it doesn’t mean I don’t feel them.

For these reasons, summer 2023 will not go down as “The Summer We Went to London.” It will not be “The Summer We Road Tripped Up the Coast to Maine.” It will not be “The Summer of the Pandemic When We Went to Drive-In Movies and Hosted Themed Costume Dinners.” It will not even be “The Summer We Spent One Perfect Adults-Only Weekend at the Best Little Air B&B Cabin.”

Maybe it will just be “The Summer We Got Through Some Hard Shit, Filed a Lot of Paperwork, Made Some Massive Lifestyle Changes, and Still Found Time to Do Some Nice Things When We Could Like Liz Falling Asleep Reading in a Hammock Upstate at Her Mom’s One Day.”

(Catch that subtle foreshadowing there?)

Yesterday, with a few days off of work, I knew I needed to get away, even if it wasn’t away away. (Jon is always so supportive when those moments strike. “Go!” he says. “It will be so good for you, you deserve some alone time!”)

I threw a few things into a bag, hopped into my car, and headed up alone to my mom and my stepdad’s house for a day or two of quiet, 5PM dinners, and giant blackberries eaten straight from the garden. I realized it was my first time out of the city all summer that didn’t involve driving to or from a camp.

We were so engaged in Chris’s hilarious stories from his days as a Naval Petty Officer stationed at Guantanamo—I mean, the guy who can’t figure out how to answer an iPhone today was somehow working in intelligence operations? With equipment?!—that we didn’t even know about the breaking news that had already engaged the rest of the world.

For the first time all summer, I was surrounded by trees. Butterflies flitted around the garden and a hummingbird hovered over one flower longer than was probably prudent. The humidity was gone. My belly was full of homemade spicy yellow tomato soup. My makeup was fading. My shoes were off. My mom smelled nice. The sun went down. The stars came out, reflecting in the pond across the street.

For the first time all summer, I really was away, if only from my routine. If only for a day or two.

Why had I waited so long to allow myself this space? We all know what they say about putting your own oxygen mask on first.

This morning, I woke up feeling closer to right again.

This morning, August was a little less scary.

There’s lots of time to do, be, smell, feel, see, live.

There’s always September, too.

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