Grafted, a summer lament

It is never quite summer. We are too close to the great white north, pinned between the wild Pacific and the vast wall that is the Rockies. It is beautiful, but summer never quite wins. Even when the sun shines its brightest, the grass and the pine needles and the bright green, hardy bushes, polished and dusted, sparkle, there is an edge. Nowhere is more enchanting, more alive, but the magic is, in part, in the lurking threat. It turns in an instant in the middle of July, a stray wind blusters, the sky darkens, chills shiver down collective spines. A fey spirit skitters over the land. Mother Nature, though she kissed us gently on the cheek that morning, laughs, brutal and powerful, the fair Galadriel with the one ring in her hand.

I long for the tropics. My children are native grown Pacific Northwesterners. Some species of pine, hard and straight, nourished by rich, glacial loam, ice-water fed, made only more fiercely beautiful by the snow that weighs their branches eight months of the year. But, I? I am a transplant, grafted to the roots of stronger stock. My bright colors, what beauty I possess, are faded, my foliage straggly and limp.

Here, Mother Nature doesn't chase Old Man Winter from his dank, earthen den for month after month of soft, sultry growth, she takes what she can get. They are awkward bedfellows. She slips into his branch bower and caresses his icy, sunken chest, rubs her full bosoms against his bony back and kisses his frigid neck until he is distracted enough to allow the green to creep in. It's a short lived respite, he grows bored of her quickly and by late August he has kicked her out of his cave, ripped the pretty feminine touches off of the wall and thrown them at her retreating back.

I want sun that bakes you to the core, chars your bones black and boils them in your blood, a rich, primordial soup. I want humidity that presses, the air hot and heavy, until it reaches the tipping point and explodes, torrents of water coming from all sides, not from the clouds, but from the surrounding air itself. I want the blunt, pounding headache of an approaching typhoon and the sinful release of the first palm-bending gusts. I want air tinged with salt, feet slipped into decades-old zoris, lovemaking that ends with a shower and a sprawl, soaking wet on the bed, the evaporation of the water from my skin the closest thing to cool to be found.

This is home now. This is their home, my tropical-born daughter no less than my tall Scot-Irish boys, but I wonder. I wonder if I could awaken my longing in her blood, if I tried. I would move in a heartbeat. St. Thomas. Costa Rica. Saipan. Hawaii. The Gulf. Bali. Mexico. I would trade all we've built, all we've painted, all we've fixed and paid and worked for, all the sweat, blood and tears...

But not the friends, mine and theirs. Not the roots. Not the calls to check up, not the weekly wine nights, not the knowledge that they will never enter a class, a camp, a lesson, a park without seeing a friendly face. Not the desire lodged deep in my heart, born in a childhood full of moves and new schools and cafeterias full of strangers, to have them be from somewhere. To have a place they call home, though they say it with a sneer for their first twenty-two years. Not that. I won't trade that.

I won't dig them up and try to replant them in shallow, sandy soil. But, I will long, each and every too brief, not quite summer, for climes where the sun has been crowned the victor and the slant of the earth mocks the meager weapons of winter, ice and snow. Begone. You have no power here. I wish.