That's It: I'm A Summer Person Now

On 'On Summer,' cozy season, and ~chaos~.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

This is the free edition of Rich Text, a newsletter about cultural obsessions from your Internet BFFs Emma and Claire. If you like what you see and hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber. We are taking the week off of podcasting in order to do some housekeeping, and plan for the months ahead. Rich Text is a reader-supported project — no ads or sponsors!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve begun to notice an old, half-remembered piece of writing fluttering around the edges of my mind – about summer’s stark beauty going unappreciated by the writer in her youth. Finally, I looked it up; it’s Lorraine Hansberry’s essay “On Summer,” which I read as a child in some sort of Junior Great Books anthology or English textbook. Most of the stories I read at that age completely escape me now, but the Hansberry essay, though simple in subject, made an enormous impression on me. Rereading it, I immediately remembered how struck I was to read, in her words, my own feelings about the seasons at the time: “the cold aloofness of winter” she adored as a child, “the traditional passionate commitment to melancholy autumn” as an adolescent. She loathed the excess of summer, the sensory assault of hot air, glaring light, grainy sand. Yes, I thought at the time. Yes exactly. 

But it’s an essay about coming to appreciate, as an adult, the joy of summer – why summer, and no other season, is seen as the fulfillment of each year’s promise, a reaffirmation of life. Watching a summer sunset with a woman dying of cancer, Hansberry reflects on the season’s “stark and intimate assertion of neither birth nor death but life at the apex; with the gentlest nights and, above all, the longest days.” She understands at last why a person might desperately hope to live long enough to see one more summer.

I disliked this turn as a young reader; I did not care to have my pretensions to seasonal intellectualism deflated by Hansberry, and preferred to hold onto my belief that liking autumn and winter reflected my own precocious complexity. Surely it was the most challenging seasons, like the most challenging art, that most flattered their admirers’ taste. But that wish rattled around in my head for years: the wish that one “might live to see at least one more summer.”

It’s been a gray but mild winter for the most part (disturbing in its own way), devoid of some of the unique pleasures of winter – a white Christmas, snow fluttering down into drifts that crunch underfoot, crisply sunny days blending into cozy evenings at home. Last winter was a bit more my scene, though lonely and depressing, as we were not socializing indoors. But this time around, I’ve come to admit to myself that it’s not just this year or this month: it’s winter. I am a summer person now. And, like everyone else these days, I am struggling to wait even one more week for the weather to warm. 

I truly used to be a cold-weather freak. I didn’t really start living until the first fall chill in the air, when I would transform into Miss Autumn Guy in the blink of an eye. “Sweaters” were something I considered, childishly, to be a personality trait of mine. Nothing was more romantic to me than snow falling in the moonlight; nothing more bracing than sub-30 temps. 

And I know exactly when that changed, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. Three years ago, I had a baby, and within days, my romance with winter was essentially over. 

He was born in mid-December, first of all. Throughout that first, dark season of his life, he often woke for the day three hours before the sun rose, as well as several times overnight. (Babies tend to do this.) When the sky began to darken in the mid-afternoon, I would collapse next to my husband, sobbing to him that I’d ruined our lives by having a baby. The prospect of another sleepless winter night was unbearable. 

This was shortly before the pandemic, so I tried to go out, even with a baby in tow. I’d walk the streets of Brooklyn with him securely strapped to my chest under my coat, but frigid tendrils of wind would reach his face, and he’d howl in fury. I’d take him indoors, to cafés or music classes, where I’d sweat as I tried to remove our layers and then quickly pile them back on as he launched into another fit of screaming. 

He’s gotten older, and it’s gotten easier. He does sleep through the night now, mostly, and he is willing to take walks (though he still hates the winter wind in his face). He goes to daycare. But every subsequent winter of his life has involved nonstop Covid surges, which have left us still uneasy about indoor socializing.

This year, balancing his and our psychological needs against the risks of infection, we have started to attend more birthday parties and playdates and family gatherings. The frequency, however, is not what we would like it to be. It’s hard to feel wholeheartedly enthusiastic about cramming his schedule with indoor gatherings amid simultaneous waves of RSV, flu, and Covid. On the other hand, none of us wants to spend 3 hours at the park in 40-degree weather – not even the rambunctious toddler in the household. 

Over the past decade, the rise of cozy seasonal influencer content has been met with a rise in criticism of the cozy aesthetic: a white-centric vision of insular retreat, peace found within the controlled walls of home, and the strictures of a tidy but lush aesthetic. “Instagram representations of coziness are primarily about safety and comfort, but they are also about order and control. Everything in its right place,” wrote Kathryn Jezer-Morton in an entry on her Mothers Under the Influence newsletter, “Is ‘cozy season’ a cry for help?” Just as important as what we see -- the couch, the socks, the candle -- are the things we don’t see: Mess, disorder, the unpredictable reality of the world outside.”

It’s true, I have to admit, that what I really loved about winter was being cozy. In other words, winter was an opportunity to turn inward and lavish care on myself: picking out soft, fluffy outfits to swaddle me against the cold, spending leisurely afternoons baking cookies and banana bread to fill the house with the scent of vanilla and cinnamon, reclining on the couch with a steaming cup of coffee and a book. Always an excuse not to go anywhere, do anything, only to nestle in my private cocoon. Jezer-Morton points out how the pleasures of coziness derive from knowing how unwelcoming the world outside is — not just the warmth, but “the awareness that out there it’s cold.” I loved winter for being so brutal that it made the creation of my own perfect retreat from the brutality a satisfying pursuit.

My cat fit into this cold-weather lifestyle; my toddler does not. He does not want to snuggle on the couch all morning with a pile of books and hot cocoa; he wants to dump all of his boxes of Duplo on the hardwood floor and then kick the pieces under the furniture while shrieking with laughter. An anticipated perk of having a kid was that it would get me off my ass, which it did, and in the summer, it can be sort of idyllic: morning walks with iced coffee, long hours at the park while chatting with neighborhood friends, trips to the zoo or the beach, the occasional dinner and cocktail outside while he zooms toy cars around the picnic table. In the winter, we’re just trapped. All that little-kid energy, and nowhere to put it. Recently I’ve found myself thinking that if we lived in a warm climate year-round, I could have four kids, or seven. In a cold climate? One often feels like too much.

Jezer-Morton attributes the controlled, curated cozy aesthetic to momfluencers, which both makes sense to me (as mothers have traditionally been tasked with making a warm and welcoming home for their entire families) and does not (as children make controlled, curated coziness next to impossible). I still, like a good old-fashioned home-maker, try to make my home warm and welcoming all winter. Holiday decorations go up, half-hearted though they may be; on weekend mornings my son helps me make banana muffins or blueberry pancakes. Last winter I insisted on new rugs for the dining room and living room to alleviate the bare expanses of floorboards, which felt almost hostile on January mornings.

But I have to admit defeat. My cozy heyday is over. Having children demands that you embrace mess and chaos, and those things are far easier to tolerate when the windows are thrown open for warm breezes and the chaos can seamlessly spill out onto sidewalks and backyards and parks.

Having a kid is supposed to change your identity in a pretty fundamental way. What I didn’t realize is that this change would keep revealing itself to me over the years – at first, big upheavals in my sense of self, then medium tremors. It took me three years to realize that I might never be a winter person again, now that it’s a season I associate with claustrophobia instead of comfort. For the first time, I recognize myself what Lorraine Hansberry recognized through her dying friend: Life is cold and lonely and isolating enough without the entombment of winter. Summer’s joys may seem simple and unsophisticated, but they bring comfort when life is, unavoidably, at its most inhospitable. No wonder that, amid an ongoing pandemic that has dragged on for years, it seems like many of us who live in colder regions have grown more and more impatient with winter. Is the painstakingly constructed comfort of coziness any match for the effortless comfort of our third hot girl summer running?

I’m not suddenly opposed to the whole hygge thing, but I’ve come to accept that my life won’t be about coziness for quite some time, and that maybe it’s a gift to find pleasure in more outward-facing ways. Maybe my evolution into a summer person really is permanent. Then again, check back with me when my child leaves daycare for school, and with it the dreaded months of summer vacation. I’m still open to being wrong. 

Coming soon on the Rich Text podcast… (a.k.a. what should be on your watchlist for March 😉)

3.13: “You” Season 4, Part 2 — We *finally* find out what Joe Goldberg is going to do with his revelation about the “Eat The Rich Killer.”

3.20: “Sex/Life” Season 2 — This deranged, questionably sexy show is back and there is so much blue and purple uplighting and we are so excited to discuss it.

3.27: “Love Is Blind” Season 4, Part 1 — LIB SEATTLE-STYLE!!! We’ll be covering the full season on Rich Text as each drop happens.

Looking ahead to April and May, we have our eyes on season 2 of “Yellowjackets.” We’re also hoping to do another more personal episode on motherhood/non-motherhood. And of course, if there’s anything on your radar that you are desperate for us to cover, let us know on here or in our Substack chat on the app! Xo

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