And that was the summer when we moved a ways up the river, far from the city and its National Guard exhaust fumes and its plywood windows and its hunched men selling baseball programs for games that would never be played. Fires over knotty pine, cirrus clouds drifting lazy in the sky. Our dogs ran circles ’round the flames. We toasted high-watt spirits and roasted marshmallows while wisps of the future floated past the blaze. Night fell deeply near the tree line, and we relished the strange summer of 2020. A great comet sailed over the roof, dark ice and rock gliding forever from the far-flung corners of unwritten history. (We tried to hail a ride.) And that was the summer when nothing was certain and nothing was known.
Sandy 