Every summer until this one, I looked forward to summer in Alabama in my dad’s backyard garden. Summer meant the end of the regular school year, the beginning of days spent watching vegetables and flowers grow, to smelling watermelons (which I don’t eat my parents do that all on their own) halved in the kitchen, to the slow spill of sunset over Birmingham.
That renewal each year also included poetry readings, books checked out from the library, the bubbling thrill of planning for new semesters filled with writing classes. Summer in Birmingham could find me in the audience of a local literary event, on stage at a reading, or just laughing with a poet-friend at a park. This year is different, of course, and although things are opening and moving toward what some folks call “normal,” it isn’t that way for me.