Eternal Summer

A January Creative Submission by Ashe Vaughn

When I was a child, science told me the sun would swallow the world. Expanding and fattening until it became a rosy red giant. The transformation would lead to heat so great the outer layers of the sun would engulf the inner planets, including Earth. vaporizing the oceans and altering the planet’s surface, bulldozing all traces of life. Afterwards, it would cool and stabilize, however life would be gone, and the earth’s surface unrecognizable. Only the hot white remnants of its fury would remain.  

My mother dramatized this, and said the world would end when God lit a fire under us, and created his New Heaven and Earth.

“Just like Noah and his ark?” I asked.

“Exactly like that, but this will be the final time.” She told me in a hushed voice. As if the end of the world was a delicate flame only Christians carried the knowledge of.

The final renewal to cleanse the sins of this world. Both seemed like the same story, but it was the only time my mother and science agreed.

I thought a lot about fire the day I learned those things. About things heating up around me uncontrollably. The heat made my head spin and my eyes water. However, the sun’s anticipated anger was billions of years away. And my favorite season was summer anyways.

Summertime was a cherry lollipop I waited for after the doctor. I braved the school year, and the doctor’s needles, in hopes of filling my mouth with the red deliciousness of summer fruit. There were the sweets that my grandmother created in the kitchen, and the beautiful bright sun that deepened my skin and bleached my hair. The sun was my favorite part, in the children’s book it was always smiling and in the light I felt it smiling down on me for eternity. 
Only three months felt like a cheap trick, crafted by my principals to kill my spirit. The winter took everything. Every time in the midwest. Without warning, without proper foresight we’d be bombarded with ice that seemed to stick to the front door like an angry cop. There was no ‘still’ winter. The wind chill alone was enough to topple you over. The beautiful autumn leaves were covered with blankets of blinding white snow. My hands ached even in mittens, and when I came inside, I’d have to slowly curl up each finger, carefully, for if I uncurled them too fast they were sure to snap like glass. The eczema on my hands would flare up and the scratchy wool scarves and layering was too much for my small body. In summer, I got to shed all of that, only needing a light top and my purse. I could leave my heavy textbooks at home, and step onto the sidewalk like a whisper, with a gentle breeze swaying through my hair. The glistening water and the lush green grass stretching and blending on the canvas of the sky. I remember laying in the field and looking up, so it was just me and that beautiful blue forever more. Summer was road trips, summer was grandma’s house, summer was freedom.

One day in an early spring biology class we learned about the Ash trees, canopying over the sidewalks during the summertime and painting the whole road in beautiful golden and sage shadows. They told us of the mythical nature of these trees, the oxygen they produced and love that gave us.

Strong and wise, eternally green, these trees softened our existence, and I was happy to share a name with them.

That day after class, I tested the limits of recess, and snuck out of the wire gate, where colorful pebbles to the sidewalk met shining blades of grass. To the street where the leaves were calling for me. Swaying and swishing branches, the books captured them exactly as they were. I touched the smooth bark, line after line as the ants marched up and down its trunk. Wrinkled but perfect, intimidating but docile, I swear I saw my grandmother’s face, and before I knew what I was doing, I was hugging her again.

At 8 years old, I was a tree hugger, and even though she didn’t have arms, I knew she was hugging me back.

 We read a national geographic article the next day saying how the only threat to the life of the tree was a little beetle called the Emerald Ash borers. That dug out the tree and cut through its insides. In little bold letters on page six, I remember reading, at the current rate of human consumption and emerald ash borer devastation, the trees will be near extinct in about 5-10 years.

My eyes welled with tears, the kids in the class eyed me peculiarly, “Tree hugger” they whispered to each other.

My teacher came and knelt beside me. Shushing me, she promised me that these beautiful trees could be saved. That there was justice in motion. We turned to the last page of the newsletter.

The page tapped me cheerfully. Scientists are working on a cure. Scientists are working in your favor. The world will be okay.

Children never learn their lessons though. During summer, I’d gorge myself on fun. We’d play water tag, littering the driveway with popped rubber balloons. Slurping ice-pop, leaving the sticky tubes to dry and curl on the porch. Buying new flip flops, now with pineapples and shades. Tossing last year’s editions. They didn’t have pineapples on them. The wind picked up the trash, the rivers washed away our sins. Out of sight out of mind, we didn’t let it bother us.

Every summer I watched the news escalate, record-breaking temperatures. Good for them. More heat equals more fun. Maybe my teacher would give them a sticker. American progress, achieve, achieve, achieve.

Bigger, better, hotter.

 More summers came, each one hotter than the last. All with an invisible force pushing us to the brink of something we couldn’t come back from. I thought about the Ash tree, was she angry at me? I visited my elementary school to see her sullen face. But there was a stump on the sidewalk standing in her place.

 The winter became the reassuring reset button. What was global warming if it was cold outside? Though summer was fun I grew to understand it wouldn’t last forever. I got older , wiser, I stopped craving and gorging myself on the sugar of summer. My taste buds became sophisticated. The autumn skyline had always drawn me near, and I was happy to be under the sun even if it was peeking at me from the cloudy underbelly of pregnant rain clouds. 

Paper instead of plastic.   

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Don’t worry kiddo, the scientists are working on a solution.  

Ignorance was embedded into my biology.

Each year I feel the chill bite me a little less. The fickleness of the midwest hides itself in the fall, but there was nothing left to hide by December, the chill wasn’t the same. For a second I wondered if my body had adjusted to the cold in a year. But then I felt my scarves sticking to my wet skin. Winter has gotten warmer.

Flowers are blooming in the Arctic 

Flint Michigan can’t get clean water 

The sins of my past, changed my present

And in the summer, after July with a week-long streak of 100 degree days. I began to look at the sky peculiarly, was it getting bigger and redder with each year?

I didn’t know if I believed in God, but I knew rage. God or the earth, something was angry at us.

Forest began to shrink, condos choking and encroaching all around them. Each year the last warm day gets pushed back further and further, until the winter becomes nothing but a gray sickly warm fall.

Scientists chained themselves to trees, but were dragged away with bloody eyes in handcuffs. Meteorologists broke down in tears when describing Milton. All of a sudden grandma’s house on the hill during summer started to seem less permanent, and looked more like the houses in North Carolina floating down the river.

The bombs and the smoke accelerated our already premature demise. The oceans filled with plastic, we chewed it and spit it out. My world was crumbling, every season started to blend in itself. Until it was like one big never-ending hellish summer day. Reality disassembled itself, the world seemed to sink. Everything felt like it was swirling downwards.

September started to feel like May

I brace myself for the winter,

But the chill didn’t come

The piles and piles of snow never fell 

White Christmas was truly a thing of the past 

Eternal summer, might just be hell.