"Our Summer made her light escape"

We’re headed home this morning, the long drive from Door County, Wisconsin, back to Frederick, Maryland. Every year—Johanna and me, three kids and the dog, 925 miles there, 925 miles back.

Honestly, sometimes it can seem interminable, and Rory (our Irish terrier) can get a little…fragrant—but it’s us. Our summer vacation.

America’s longest road—Interstate 90—unwinds eastward this morning ahead of us from Akron, Ohio, where we overnighted for a visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame (on Induction Weekend, no less). Rory’s sleeping, the kids are on their screens, Johanna’s driving (she does the whole drive—she doesn’t really trust me with her Rivian), and I’m a little wistful.

Soon, very soon, the familiar rhythms of work and school will reassert themselves—for me, the deadlines, the interviews, the endless, fascinating, exhausting procession of events that make up our public life.

And then, for the children, the cacophonous return to school, a morning that for a few minutes thrills them all as they are reunited with friends and classmates and meet new kids and they all reconstruct that world that belongs to them only—before the bell rings, the teachers (rightly) assert their leadership, and time once again belongs to the clocks and not the sun.

But not yet. Not quite yet.

This morning still belongs to summer. And I am grateful.

The memories of the season are already rising before me and assuming their place in my heart.

Michael, Mary Lou, and me running and jumping off the dock at Sister Bay into the bracing cold of the clear waters of Lake Michigan.

Rory racing down the trails in the Björklunden woods.

Evenings with Michael watching the Cubs on an iPad.

Helen, almost 14 now, lovely in a way that startles me—and strong enough for herself to challenge me and my opinions. A lot.

Johanna at the Hall of Fame in Canton giving herself wholly to our boy's enthusiasm (which has become her own, too) because that is what her love does for all of us.

Here is what I want to say: through every generation of trouble, strife, and anxiety our beloved country has seen—and God knows we are living through another—there is still nothing on this earth quite like an American summer.

It is a gift for each one of us. It doesn't matter much which one is yours.

The family cottage on the lake.

Sitting out on the stoop with some iced tea (or something stronger), as the traffic subsides and the heat lightning flickers above the city.

The view from the porch as the thunderstorms roll in off the fields.

The one big trip to a corner of the country you'd never seen.

The grandkids.

Falling in love, at whatever age that fate or the good Lord arranges.

Above all, the children’s summer—that endless, lawless stretch of hours we spend the rest of our lives, secretly, trying to get back to.

We forget that, maybe. There were summers during the Depression. Summers while the world was at war. Summers in the years of assassinations, riots, Vietnam, Watergate, recession, terrorism, pandemic.

History remembers those years for the crises that filled the headlines. In fact, those crises are basically what we are referring to when we say the word, “history.” But the people who lived through those years—especially as we get older and those crises subside and the memory of them fades—we cremember something else as well.

Children caught fireflies. Teenagers fell in love. Families drove too far in overheated station wagons. Someone learned to swim. Brothers and sisters sang folk songs around a bonfire on the beach (that one belongs to me and my nine siblings).

All of that is not an escape from history. That’s history too.

A trio for the passing of our 2026 summer.

My mother used to recite this one by A.E. Housman, an English poet of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. It still reminds me of Glen Lake, Michigan, where the Moran clan spent our summers in a rambling old house with a beach just the right size for those bonfires.

by A. E. Housman

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

This one is a favorite of mine. It’s by Emily Dickinson, and it’s the poem that first won me over to her. I love the way she personifies a season of our earth, as if her summer moves and speaks in a manner and meaning of a being just beyond our comprehension.

by Emily Dickinson

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away –

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy –

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon –

The Dusk drew earlier in –

The Morning foreign shone –

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone –

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

And finally, Mary Oliver. She’s made several appearances in this column; there’s something both deeply sensible and deeply spiritual about her work.

by Mary Oliver
 
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?