Illinois

Going to Illinois to get my girl.

La Seine à la Grande Jatte by George Seurat (Source: Wikiart)

No. 31: Illinois

Summer is here, and by here I mean Chicago. I arrived yesterday by plane. I had a middle seat and something smelled bad and a guy behind me had a medical emergency. It was awful. I don’t remember being so bothered by crowds of people before the pandemic. My forced solitude and the empty world has awakened a conditional love for space. I’m happy the world’s opening up again when it’s hugging and laughing and being happy and at-ease with everyone, but a hundred people clawing their way on and off the fuselage of an airplane? That I can do without. 

I’m here to get my girlfriend, Grace, and bring her home with me. A week from now we’ll pack up her car and drive back to Oakland together. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the start of the Midwestern summer. There’s every shade of green and sparkling blue lakes. But mostly green. Green and green and green contrary to California summer which is brown and brown and brown. The air smells sweet with the fragrance of hot plants. It’s humid, which is usually put as a negative, but I don’t mind. It’s entirely different, and that’s nice. 

Technically it’s summer in California too, but besides higher temperatures it’s hard to tell. Lacking delineated seasons, the golden state is much the same year-round. In the Midwest, however, summer feels like a season of celebration rather than just a hot spell. After a long and frigid winter, Midwesterners see the light after months of dark, and geeze louise they make the most of it.

Every weekend there’s some kind of festival, cookout, or outdoor concert. Homeowners buy new patio sets and arrange them for sunset reading sessions or barbequeside chats. Golfers spread out on patterned lawns armed with quivers of iron and carbon. Motorcyclists rev their engines and fly down highways. Boats are launched. People are happy and together and warm in the sun. And I’m lucky to take it all in, to be an ambassador of California, to enjoy the unique opportunity to wonder if the people back home have become too accustomed with their lot, too nonchalant about the blessing that is a California summer, too spoiled. The Midwestern summer is a short and cathartic affair. It is born and a few months later it dies. For the time it’s here, it’s adored. 

I can’t fully adore the summer like they must because I’m a spoiled Californian myself, migrating here for the summer months and leaving for warmer weather when the winter returns. What’s better? The low lows of winter and the high highs of summer? Or that mellowness of a basically unchanging, single season of beauty? 

It’s both. All of it. Yes. ♦