On Losing June

On the surface, I was glad to say “good riddance” to this particular calendar page. I didn’t actually sit down and do the calculations, but this had to be the Hudson Valley’s wettest June in the history of human settlement, or at least since somebody started keeping records of such things. Another day, another bunch of random, stupid pains, another sinus headache, a whole bunch of rotten nights.

Then I started to think about previous Junes. And, at least for the years I worked in the lighting industry, I’d always seem to lose June. The industry’s major trade show, Lightfair, was always scheduled some time around Memorial Day weekend. Which, for most lighting companies, meant you had to scramble through the spring designing, building, testing, documenting and finally creating beautiful marketing literature for your new line of fixtures – or at least if they were not new, what you brought to the show would represent barely-working samples and the beautiful marketing literature for the products you started to launch the year before but never quite got off the table (or the engineer’s AutoCad program, or the sample-builder’s studio, or got UL approval, or figured out a way to get the goddamned ballast into something tiny enough to make all of your marketing claims about how beautiful, sleek and minimalist the thing is actually true enough to spin into something you could sell.)

Which, for me, second banana in the Marketing Department, meant that June would be lost due to several factors: 1. Recovering from Lightfair by taking on all the “urgent” projects we’d let pile up, earmarked “to do immediately after Lightfair”; 2. Feverishly producing the price book for not only the new products from the show, but the adds/drops and increases across our entire product line, which involved sometimes infantile infighting among product managers and hours of horrible meetings and major, major nagging to get all the input on time; or 3. Feverishly producing the sales literature for the products that we only had laser-printed spec sheets for because they were ready enough to show at the Fair (if you didn’t examine them too closely) but not ready enough to sell. And by God, the company president wanted to be ready at the first phone call from some architect or lighting designer who had been in Vegas or New York (the show alternated every year) and saw the such-and-such luminaire, you know, the one hanging from the ceiling that had that great new lamp in it (which, unbeknownst to them, was only available in Europe and we had to wheedle, beg and plead some Austrian product manager for a sample in time for the show and it only arrived that morning) and wanted to place an order for a hundred of them to install in his new office building.

Christ. After seven and a half years of this, is it any wonder my back gave out?

But it always meant losing June in some way. Last June, even though I wasn’t working, I was preparing my mind and body to go back, and ate up so much time with physical therapy and general angst that I missed, again, so many of the hidden joys of the month. Not things you notice as you dash between appointments, or randomly look out a window. But the things it really takes time to see.

And I did have a few of those moments this past month. If I’d lost June I wouldn’t have taken time to watch the birth of a fawn. I wouldn’t watch for it each morning after it mysteriously vanished, then felt the relief when, after a week, it reappeared, bounding after its mother. Wouldn’t have watched the doe pause to let the little one nurse, its tiny tail whirling like a fluffy propeller until Mom decided he’d had enough.

And I wouldn’t have solved the mystery of why the bark is disappearing in long strips from the pine tree in the back yard. I was home alone one afternoon, and while washing a few dishes I looked up, and watched as a squirrel doggedly worked at removing it (can a squirrel work doggedly?), then sheared off one long whip and ran off with his booty. But why? Is pine bark a great squirrel treat, like beef jerky, or would it become part of a nest? Is there a squirrel S/M parlor somewhere? As curious as I was, though, I wasn’t about to chase down the squirrel to find out. Some days my self-esteem is low enough without being bawled out by a squirrel.

And I would have missed how the sky looked in the early evenings, when our - it seemed - daily tropical deluge was passing through and we’d have swollen blue clouds on the east side of the house and a glorious pastel sunset on the west side.

And this one, if I hadn’t taken the time to notice, I would have missed completely. Husband was away working on a project, and called about eight to let me know he’d be at it a few more hours, so not to wait up. Since our garage is directly beneath the bedroom, he asked me to leave his bay door open so he wouldn’t wake me coming in. Doing this involved me putting on shoes, taking on yet another flight of stairs for the day (I have very little energy left at that time of night) crossing to the other side of the garage and pushing the button that automatically opens his bay door (for some reason my bay has two buttons – one just outside the door from the house and one by the garage door. I get the concept, but if you could put one button in at the top of the stairs, why not both?) Anyway, I’d just opened his door and the roar and vibration had just come to a stop. The nightly deluge had also just stopped. Maybe. Because I still heard rain. Yet nothing was falling from the sky. I heard the rush of wind, but the trees weren’t moving. I stood at the top of the driveway, very still, and listened. And all I could surmise was that this was the sound of water from the downpour (if you know Florida, we’d been having those kind of rains – sudden, severe gully washers) rushing down the mountain. And if I’d grumpily trudged over to the door, opened it, then huffed back inside, I would have missed this moment entirely.

Happy July, everybody. Stop and take a look around you some time. You don’t know what you might be missing.