Roz Chast’s January New Yorker cover “Cruellest Month” made us laugh out loud. “I wanted to show just the horribleness of January.” Chast says. And she did, of February as well. We particularly relate to:

Bombogenesis?

Sunset at 11 am.

Heat Wave

Arctic Blast

Flu

Cabin Fever

Crosstown Bus Never Comes

Weird Frozen Pellets

 

Then we remembered something:

 

 

…a kind of summer…

…

I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught —

two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.

By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember

the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank,
the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

—Just As The Calendar Began to Say Summer by Mary Oliver

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A post shared by Ellen (@ellensilverman) on Sep 15, 2015 at 3:13pm PDT

…

Summer airing –
    trying on a quilt,
strutting around.

—Kikaku, 17C

…

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

—Li Po (8th century)