We often share our members’ news and recommendations at 26 – in fact we share both almost every month. However, these sharings are always confined to fragments. A tiny glimpse (often with a hint of marketing attached!). This summer, we invited our members to pick one moment from their summers, and share it with us. The aim was simple: Inhabit the moment. Notice more.
And write in whatever way feels most natural to you.
Late in the evening of the eclipse, we wandered from a gathering at a friend’s house down the curving road to the meadow. We were close enough to home that, at half past ten, it would have been easy to turn towards bed, but instead we continued meadow-wards, in the promise that something even more exciting than the eclipse lay ahead.
I thought I spotted one out of the corner of my eye as we neared the field, crossing the bridge over the railway – but it seemed too good to be true, to see one so readily, and it moved too quickly for me to be certain.
Through the creaking gate, across the grass (turned to straw in the weeks of unrelenting heat), we wandered. In the dark, the others were visible only as shadows, slightly darker than the night. Parents with young children perched on their shoulders, forming strange hybrid creatures; couples leaned close together on the ground.
We found a secluded patch where to lay down, dry grass poking sharply through our thin summer clothes. Voices carried easily over the open meadow, the strangers around us present but not quite intelligible.
As I picked out constellations remembered from childhood, engaging in that foolish game of pointing out shapes in the night sky (there! don’t you see? right there!), sooner than I expected, I spotted one: a meteor flashing across the sky far above. It travelled fast, much faster than the blinking aeroplanes or satellites, such that, despite its assured wonder and beauty, you weren’t quite convinced you had seen it.
I would have been content with witnessing just one, but they kept coming, joyfully traversing the sky in spurts and bursts. I was struck by their similarity to early modern depictions of meteors and comets (see The Public Domain Review’s “Flowers of the Sky”), which had always seemed too long in the tail, too fiery-bright to be accurate.
I feel as though I must have seen one before at some point in my life, but my memory may be muddled with songs about shooting stars, so many stories of wishes and prophecies and magic. The real thing was as special as promised.
The night was temperate, slightly cooler than the day but still warm. We might have slept there, not uncomfortably, under the stars, but instead we brushed the grass from our bodies and walked back home, glancing every now and then at the sky, imagining the lights to be imprinted still on our vision.
– Chloe Green
Summer Diary 2: “Signs of Life” by Lacy Rohre
It’s bedtime after a sweaty July day in Texas and the family’s house is growing dim room by room. One bedside lamp still glows as the mother lays in bed, scrolling her phone. She knows this is a bad habit but tonight she’s not persuaded by influencers or seduced by short videos. She’s looking for evidence of her son… Read more.