The Ache of Late Summering? Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name
- Laura A. Weber
- Aug 6
- 6 min read
"Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came;
You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to go where everybody knows your name"
- from "Cheers" (by Gary Portnoy & Judy Hart-Angelo, 1982)
August. The golds and oranges begin. The days start getting shorter and evenings are cooler. It's often an invitation to pause and take a pulse. There's an art to it, living in a liminal space, an in-between time. Perhaps a slight schedule adjustment or shift in awareness would help. It can be a lonely time, especially when the kids are back in school or the end of "summer vacation" makes us realize we didn't really do anything different than the rest of the year. Schedules were packed. Chaos! Opportunities were lost. We didn't really thrive. Friends were missed. Milestones weren't marked with any depth or appreciation. Wild adventures and potent dreams are just wisps of longing now. A dull ache. The long Loneliness is beginning to settle.
This isn't just about one season passing into another, but Life itself. A recent death reminded me how truly precious Life is, when growing into Love's fullness.
The Age of Loneliness that eminent sociobiologist E.O. Wilson wrote about characterizes the existential ache. He called it the Age of the Eremocene, or the Age of Loneliness. It's the bereft era, the desert of our existence. It could feel like late August, when the sun is at that funny angle, the birds start prepping for departure, and the kids go back to school. Arid. It might just feel empty. It's Life closed in on us. Boxes of stuff. Walls. Dreading that old inevitable friend, death.
On the macro-scale, same story. When humanity has destroyed most of the planet we all belong to, our Common Home, we are bound to feel desolate, alienated. With rapid biodiversity loss comes a great Loneliness. An ache of emptiness.
In the Anthropocene, humans have pillaged Earth's wild places, erasing natural beauty and habitat by toxifying soil, air, and water reservoirs, decimating our wild kin. We've eviscerated, strand by intricate strand, Earth's complex, interdependent web of Life. No wonder we're lost and lonely. We have traded Life's infinite variety and majesty for a slurry of monoculture sludge. And we are adrift in a flotsam of desolation, longing for connection. We're lonely.
What we need is a special place, not work, not home, where we don't need an excuse to just show up. "Where everybody knows our name."
Wherever we show up regularly, not on a schedule, is that special place. Everyone is welcome.
Public gardens and parks might be the "Cheers" of the Age of Loneliness. How many times have we encountered wizened elders on a park bench or lingering in the Garden? Sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes the antidote to loneliness as the third place. "Not home, not work, but the informal spots in between: the cafe where the same faces appear each morning, the library, the allotment, the corner of the pub, the bench outside the shop." (Source)
Why not the Garden?
Research confirms that loneliness experienced in the autumn of Life isn't offset by a packed calendar, having "places to go, people to meet," but deepening in relationship. It requires welcoming places that are available without needing to be scheduled, to be occasions of connection that do not require a sort of transactional currency, where someone has set aside time to be with us, a "visit." We need a place without a beginning time and an end time. These are special places, like public gardens and parks, where we can just "come on in" - like it's our happy place - and be received with warmth and hospitality by all our wild kin, arbor elders, flowers, veggies, and plant cousins in the neighborhood. Nobody is being "visited." We all belong. We're part of a community. A wider "We."
As Summer winds down, we can enjoy just such a special place. Like this iconic place preserved in our imagination from the late 19th c., a public park, where everybody goes to hang out and relax.
In the art of creating welcoming spaces, nothing is as riotous, as enticing as a late summer Garden! Pull up a bench. It's like a seat that someone saved just for us. ("Norm!") It's the wild unpredictability of Life colliding with someplace familiar. And everybody knows our name. The bees, the trees, the birds, the seas. If we return regularly, we're the usual suspects who give it energy. And we leave our energy signature all over the Places We Love.
What's not to love about the Garden in late summer? It might feel like a sci-fi movie with a rogue entity taking over (think, "The Blob")! Or just your typical veggie garden after a wet spring and summer, rife with an overwhelming assemblage of hothouse or cherry tomatoes, cukes, carrots, peas, melons, beans, and overripe spring leftovers that just keep ripening, and smelling. Your neighbors see you coming and RUN! The veggies are so voluminous, so colorful, so fragrant, we just want to share - and our family can't eat it all - so we pack them into produce bins, bags, boxes, barrels, and bundles. And begin quietly leaving them on doorsteps, at foodbanks, even gifting fresh produce to our unsuspecting dental hygienist or hairdresser. We're so proud: "You should see my rutabagas!"
The thing is, everyone should be able to come to the Garden and select the ripest, freshest, most delectable fruits of the sweet abundance of the Earth at just the right moment, in late Summer. Yep, even the rabbits and squirrels, deer, aphids, spiders and birds. We're all just trying to make a living. And there's enough. There's plenty for us all. Like a Giving Garden. All good gifts.
If we are a Gardener, we're like the bartender or the barista. We know what everybody likes. We know exactly when the timing is right, when to pluck, when to let it ripen.
We've been weeding and watering these babies since the get-go. We know what they love and what they don't, soil, sun exposure, and moisture. We've protected and nurtured them every step of the way. Why not do what any self-respecting Gardener does: share the abundance! Make the connections between plants and people, people and creatures, creatures and plants. We can make the introduction if our friends are in need. Weed out the loneliness; water the connections.
"Welcome to the Garden! Pull up a bench! It's good to see you! Now, would you like to meet my peppers?"
This is the invitation of late Summering. Welcome to the Garden.
(Dedicated to our beloved Claudia Spaulding, 1937-2026... May you grow in that New Garden, Surging into the Fullness of Love)
"Places We Love"
by Ivan V. Lalic
Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave
Places we love together, together, together
And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window:
a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,
And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,
And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.
(Source)
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