I bit into a fresh blueberry and it tasted like earth, like dirt, like hot sun and dry fields where farmers wore gloves and wiped rolling tears of sweat from their collarbones and somewhere, a great American novelist was watching, observing, getting ready to write it all down. All this from a lone, navy, pungent blueberry. I grew up on a beach, but the sun today is making me think of an imagined farmland. It's land I've never really seen; the middle of America, except for a brief week in St. Louis and a weekend in Chicago and a layover in Detroit, is a mystery to me. I don't know the ways people live out there, but I suppose it's much like here, except without the cement walls weighing them down.

Or maybe it's more like northern California, all wineries and salt-of-the-earth types, which is probably not true but just what I've dreamed up after two vacation stints in San Francisco and Napa/Sonoma.

Whatever it's like, it's here: summer. I spent the weekend before last on a field on the bay watching music on three different stages, dirt blowing into our eyes, caking our cheekbones and ears, wondering when I lost some ambitions, but feeling my bones loosen up with the idea, with the heat.

Then I spent the holiday weekend here in New York (the first time I hadn't spent it on a beach somewhere), holding hands and wondering when I became okay with new traditions, because I am okay with new traditions.