It is either a sign of shortsightedness, muleheadedness or just plain stupidity, but every year summer takes me by surprise, and not in a delightful way. It starts in the low-lit subzero days of February, when I spend ten minutes every morning putting on my big coat, boots and woolies, longing for the day when all I’ll need to do to get out of the house is slip on a pair of clogs. It continues through March, when I am fed up with nothing but cabbages and swedes at the market, and dream longingly of tomato and mozzarella salads; of succotash made from fresh cranberry beans and corn cut off the cob; of the chubby round lavender eggplant and skinny long yellow squash waiting to be turned into ratatouille; of the blueberry buckle that has been a summer staple of my family’s since long before I was born; of pie, glorious pie; of long happy crawls through the market; of walking through Flushing Meadows with Lloyd and stopping at the Lemon Ice King of Corona on the way back to the 7 train; of tall ice-filled drinks in the daytime and cool cotton undershirts at night. Then hey presto, it’s July, and all of those lovely thoughts disappear under the weight of heat, humidity, ozone advisories, mercurial subway schedules, sinus headaches, gnats, short tempers as far as the eye can see and the ear can hear, and the realization that I’m another year older and nowhere closer to either a bakery or a finished book. I never fail to underestimate how difficult it is to actually think in this sort of weather; I may not be more distracted and scattershot in hot weather than in cold, but damn, it sure feels as if I am. Add the special circumstances of this particular summer, namely a heat wave that knocked our power out for a week, another heat wave that didn’t knock out our power, but might as well have, and the looming four weeks of grand jury duty, and you get (or I get, anyway) full-bore summer fatigue, the kind that causes me to think heretical thoughts like “maybe it’s *not* worth all this for tomatoes after all.”
It’s a terrible state of mind in which to find oneself: after all, the world is full of people living harder lives in hotter weather with a fraction of the advantages and resources I’ve been lucky enough to have in life, and have still. Fortunately, I am at heart a simple tool. If I can’t shake off the doldrums, I can at least hold them at bay for a few hours, and not just via the liberal application of alcohol. 
Yesterday morning I found myself repeating the same tired noise in my head (you’re wasting another weekend, slacker!) and took to the streets of Fun City, camera in hand, to see what I could see. Normally, Saturday mornings are market days for me, but ever since the power outage, and subsequent purging of our fridge, I have been seriously off my cooking-and-baking feed. Because we spent that week eating all of our meals out, and I paid what now strikes me as a shocking amount of money for backup internet service, this month is a little leaner than usual, requiring the curbing of my usual summer-market exuberance; between these two factors, the thought of foodshopping seemed particularly depressing this week. Then I remembered that I’d wanted to spend my day off post-Blogathon at the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, one of my very favorite places in New York City, but in the end I eschewed the Heather Garden for the opportunity to sit in a cool place and knit for a few hours. Now the temperature in New York is no longer 105 degrees in the shade, it’s a good time to go to the park, and so off I went to the Heather Garden, camera in hand.
Fort Tryon Park is better known as the home of the Cloisters, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art keeps their collection of medieval religious artwork and relics. It is a cool, quiet, beautiful place to spend the day, and it was what brought me to the park in the first place. It is not, however, what keeps bringing me back to the park. It is hard to refrain from gushing, but I’ll try: simply put, Fort Tryon Park has three virtues that make it my favorite park in the city: it is home to the Heather Garden, a small, beautiful pathway filled with flowers, planted and tended by park volunteers; it affords spectacular views of the Hudson River, the kind that make you understand what captured the imagination of the Hudson River School painters; and it is less than 15 minutes from midtown Manhattan on the A train. Five years ago, I took a week’s vacation at home. I had planned to do all the things I’d fantasized about doing on my daily commute into work: spending unstructured time at the museums and at the library; going to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for cookies at Madonia Brothers and ravioli at Borgatti; going out to Coney Island and sitting on the beach with a Heineken and a paper hat filled with obscenely deep-fried seafood. I headed for the Cloisters, walked through the Heather Garden, spent all of 20 minutes at the Cloisters and then beat a hasty retreat back to the Heather Garden, where I sat on a raised bench for the rest of the day. I never did make it to Arthur Avenue, or to the library, or to Coney Island, that week. It is a lucky thing that Lloyd and I don’t live in the neighborhood, or I would be hard-pressed to come home, at least until late autumn, when the foliage dies and the air crosses the line from pleasantly chilly to just plain bonechilling.
In short, a trip to the Heather Garden is always a good for what ails me, and yesterday morning, it was magnificent. The air was hot but not thick; the sun was bright but not painful. All around me were travelers, joggers, parents with strollers, horticulturalists, all happy to be in such a place on such a morning. I found blossoms as tiny as the nail on my pinky, and as large as my two fists pressed together, knuckle to knuckle. I found lacy shadows on the ground, made by sunlight and linden leaves. I saw clusters of flowers and leaves that reminded me of lace, and shot pictures of them, wondering if I would ever be enough of a knitter to transform what I saw into lace. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it: an optical illusion, the sort that I rarely have the good timing or foresight to catch on camera. This time, though, I caught it: a morning glory catching the sun in a way that suggested it was lit from within. Within minutes of my getting the shot, the sun had shifted and the illusion was gone, although the morning glory still looked bright and rich and lovely. My work here was done: it only remained for me to sit under the linden trees and look out at the river, seeing the George Washington Bridge downriver and feeling both very close to it and a thousand miles away from it, contemplating my subway ride downtown to the cafe where Bunni and I do most of our Crafting-in-Public, realizing that as soon as we were done with our work, I wanted to go to the market and buy as much corn and as many blueberries and tomatoes as I could possibly afford, and I wanted to take them home and turn them into the food of which I’d spent the winter dreaming, and calling Bunni to let her know that I was on my way downtown, and that no lousy summertime angst was going to stop me.