Waning summer a season of mixed emotions

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This article was published 15/08/2022 (1490 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ten years ago, American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey released an unlikely summer anthem.

Summertime Sadness, off of her 2012 sophomore studio album, Born to Die, isn’t the kind of feel-good, sun-on-your-face jam you’ll hear blasting from an open car window. No, it’s a melancholy, sepia-soaked ballad about the endings of things.

Apparently, quite a few people have currently “got that summertime, summertime sadness,” to borrow the chorus, because this 10-year-old song is doing numbers. Last week, Chart Data, an aggregate that pulls data from a host of industry sources, tweeted that the song earned one million daily streams on Spotify for the first time ever, prompting many people to make variations of the same joke: “everyone OK out there?”

Lana Del Rey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdrL3QxjyVwVitamin String Quartet’s version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQrVYZNQfcI

It’s a good song — for what it’s worth, the Los Angeles-based Vitamin String Quartet, which is known for its arrangements of pop songs, also does an absolutely devastating version, which underscores just how good this song is melodically — but perhaps its endurance is owed to the fact that summertime sadness is indeed A Thing, and it is indeed A Thing right now.

For me, summertime sadness hits right about now, in mid-August, when the mornings start to cool off, the days become noticeably shorter and there’s just something in the breeze. I love fall, but there’s something worth mourning about the end of summer — especially when you’re a kid, when the end of summer means the end of freedom and a return to routine and structure.

But pandemic-era summers — of which there have been three, but who’s counting? — have their own flavour of summertime sadness, one that’s less about mourning what was and more about mourning what could have been. Summer 2020 was, at least in Manitoba, maybe the least weird of the three, paradoxically; we had very few cases of COVID-19 and an entire week with no new cases at all — but COVID was still new back then. Everything was cancelled and no one really knew how to be in the world.

Summer 2021 was supposed to be Hot Vax Summer — because, you know, summer in Manitoba doesn’t have enough pressure on it — but then it barely rained and everything turned brown and some days just had “smoke” in the forecast. Oh, and also, the pandemic continued to rage. Another year with no festivals or any of the other tentpoles that anchor summer. Not even the weather could be relied upon. And so we waited, again, to feel relief.

But if those early pandemic summers were defined by absence, this late-pandemic summer has been defined by a frenzied rush to make up for lost time. After all, summer 2022 was the summer everything came “back.” Concerts came back. Travel came back. Festivals came back. Weddings came back. The overly air conditioned office came “back.” Ready or not.

Everything is back — but everything has changed. No one gets out of a once-in-a-generation, life-altering event without having their life altered in some way. Some people’s lives have been altered permanently, and I can only imagine how left behind they might feel — that everyone has moved on without them. Everything is back, but nothing’s the same. And yet we’re supposed to just “return to normal” as though nothing happened at all.

Maybe that’s true of any big shift or season change. Sometimes you feel ready to move on; sometimes you feel left behind. In winter, when things are blanketed in snow and the trees are bare and the nights are long, it’s hard to imagine summer ever coming back — and then it does, and it’s hard to imagine it ever being so cold. But every season is brand new. To quote the English novelist Philippa Gregory, “one never gets the same summer twice.” So, if this summer has been hard or weird for you, trust that there’s another one coming.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: JenZoratti