Peach season!

Summer in Ohio is truly lovely (well, except when, as happened last year, temperatures soared to the 100s!). It's a time when time slows down for those of us whose jobs allow us some time off (I'm not fully there yet since I start working full-time again on Monday), and it's a time of sounds and sights that make summertime poetry.

When I hear the first cicadas, I know we're full in summer, and that didn't happen until just this past week, when I returned home from working the Summer Teaching Institute. It's the time for cherries, which are my very favorite snack and of which I simply can't eat enough (one cup of cherries is only 84 calories!).

And, of course, it's the time for peaches! Yesterday, my husband and I went to the nearby town of Granville for their wonderful farmer's market, and came back with a bounty of farm-raised eggs, home-made bread, organically grown onions and the first peaches of the season (aptly named Flaming Fury).

Today, it'll be a day to make a cherry pie for my husband (his favorite) and a peach cobbler, just because. But mostly I love to have the peaches as nature intended them, naked.

Summer around here is also the time to have the windows open, which is something the cats love. My husband and I aren't air conditioning people and while we hear our neighbors' ACs going on and off all the time, we are the odd ones out because, unless temperatures in the house go over 83 degrees, we cool the house with fans and we tend to sleep only with the ceiling fan whirring gently above us.

Summer is also the time for reading non-school related books, and I'm now in the midst of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, which is superb. I decided to go for it (it's a pretty hefty tome and will take me some time to finish) after we visited Gettysburg and I realized how little I actually know about the Civil War, even though I teach that period in many of my literature classes.

My undergraduate major was History and Literature of Latin American and I find that the interdisciplinary training I received (unbeknownst to me) then has made it practically impossible for me to analyze literature without placing it within its historical context (historicizing is what we call it in academia). That contextualization makes literature (or any piece of art) more interesting and relevant. It was like learning that Mozart's Requiem was written for a father who made his life impossible. Such knowledge definitely changes the perspective of things.

Tomorrow I dive into the maelstrom of three weeks of full-time teaching for our bridge program at my small college on the hill. While I am looking forward to teaching and to getting to know the students, I know it will be grueling. But well worth it and, after that, I will still have about a month to really do absolutely nothing very relevant (except plan classes for the fall). I'm looking forward to that and I'm pledging here and now that, next summer, I will make more time to do what summer tends to do best: nothing in a rush or on a deadline.