Long days

It's just past nine and there's still light in the sky over the Sound, the long blue kind that lasts until nearly ten. In a month it'll be gone by eight. But tonight the windows are open and somebody down the block is playing a trumpet badly and the swifts are still out, and I'm not going to turn on a lamp until I have to.

Seattle summers are what we get in exchange for November. Everyone here knows the deal. From the beginning of July until the rain comes back, the city lives outdoors like it's afraid of being caught inside. Volunteer Park is full every evening until dark, blankets end to end, people reading and arguing and pretending not to be asleep. I walked up there after dinner tonight and sat on the steps by the water tower and watched the light go orange on the reservoir.

Duluth has long days too, about the same as here, give or take. But they felt different growing up, because of the lake. Here the long evening is warm. There, even in July, the evening came up off the water with a cold edge to it, and you went down to Park Point in a sweatshirt and came home with sand in your socks and the sky still light behind you. My mother calls it "cooler by the lake," the way the weather on the radio does, as if it were a separate town.

My father was on the boats in summer. The shipping season runs from spring until the ice, so the long days were the days he was gone longest. I remember lying in bed with the sky still light at ten, on a school night, and listening for a horn from the harbor and knowing it wasn't his boat, and waiting anyway. I don't think I've ever told my mother that. I think she knows.

They say it'll be in the nineties here this week, which this city is not built for. I've bought a second fan and I'll complain about it with everyone else. But tonight it's perfect, and I'm going to sit here until the last of it goes.