What did you do on your last day of summer? What warranted your time and your attention? What grabbed your last moments of warmth by the affection of the Sun? What gripped at your collar and plunged its mouth against your own turning your cheeks crimson?
Slippery, green, mossy walls that dove down along the man-made division of Earth and mother nature and barricaded in the swelling blue of Lake Michigan, served as perch and enemy today. The Sun was hot outside the bee-lingering post of the new hotel on 53rd. We walked, friend and I, from 52nd until we got to Promontory Point. There, we sat and filled the air with talk and songs. I jumped into the icy water, joining ducks, seagulls, soggy bread; and cosine and sine of water’s waves. Saving my life and reminding me of importance, significance, and peoples’ centrality – I pushed, pulled, and tugged at outstretched arms. Damn, I was heavy and that wall was slippery.
Sometimes the extremity of good and bad, sine and cosine of negativity and positivity remind us of our fragility and finiteness. Sometimes it takes less than that. Sometimes more.
Summer ended already, but the Sun said goodbye today. A good book on a doorstep and a good slip into the freezing lake water served as simultaneous end punctuation and indented line of the next chapter.
Gabriella Gini 