Summer's End

A photo essay with cocktail

Credit: Sandra Benvento

Yesterday’s sleepless night’s doldrums considerably brightened with this email from my son’s fiancée, Sandy: a sunrise she captured from the tiny beach hamlet of Cutchogue. It’s been too long—six months, in fact—since I sat on a beach and watched this hour break over the horizon. It was cold and wet and the beach itself had been chewed to nothing by winter’s storms. The nearest beach to me now besides Coney Island is along the Rockaways where a woman was bitten by a shark last month. That doesn’t bother me so much but it would require a nap first to safely drive out there. So I stare at Sandy’s photo, at how the rocks and shells gather at the edge of the shoreline as if they, too, are mesmerized by horizon’s burst, captativated as I am by the gradual gilding of the sea gently bringing on a final summer day.

The old painting hangs on the wall opposite my bed. I wake up to it every morning. It is the last image I see before falling asleep. I found it in a pile at the Salvation Army maybe forty years ago and it has traveled with me from house to house, one of the first to be unboxed to make a new home. Most people don’t quite see what I do the first time they come upon it: fir trees along a lake’s bank seen through the fragile gauze of twilight’s blue light. The painter must be in a boat, the lake a still sheet as she captures the last of the summer’s day. The pale water darkens the closer it flows toward the shore, the tips of the trees pale green with the lingering touch of the sun; the late summer sky reflects the dimming of the day. I imagine there are still a few swimmers languishing in the water, reluctant to shrug on again the wood’s wooly humid air. And fishermen, there are a few, perched upon rocks believing there is one last pull on the line.

These are the images I am caught between as summer closes. The sea will roughen. The forest will silence. They will hold their secrets until next spring.

---

And now a toast to the end of summer!

Italian aperol spritz

Depending on number of gathered guests, mix together in a chilled pitcher the following ingredients:

3 parts Apertivo
2 parts Prosecc
1 part seltzer
thin curled ribbons of orange skins

Add a few ice cubes to each guest's generous-size wine glass and eually