Hank found the cool tile at five-fifty this morning. He moved from his bed to the kitchen floor without waking me, which means he was quiet about it, which is unusual for a dog who is not generally quiet about anything. By the time I came downstairs, he was already settled, chin on the floor, watching the door to the back porch with the patient dignity of a dog who has decided he has done enough for the day and is prepared to defend that position.
I stepped over him and made coffee and went out to the porch. The ceiling fan wobbled overhead. The air was heavy even at that hour, the kind of August morning that tells you exactly what the afternoon will be.
I sat with my book and for a while I didn’t open it.
That’s been happening more this summer. Not because I don’t want to read. I always want to read. It’s that I find myself sitting with the thing first, feeling its weight in my hands, before I start. I don’t know when that habit developed. It might be a sign of age. It might be a sign of the summer we’re having. Probably both.
The news has been loud. I don’t mean this as a complaint about how the news gets made, because Howard covers all of it far better than I could, five days a week, with patience and care. I mean it as a fact about the air itself. There is a weight to August 2026 that you feel before you even turn anything on. The world is carrying something heavy, and everyone who is paying attention knows it.
The question, for a person of a certain age and a certain kind of attention, is what to do with that weight.
I’ve been thinking about this because of what I’ve noticed in myself, not as a man in the news business but as a reader. The instinct when things are loud is to either absorb everything, which leaves you hollow, or to shut it all out, which leaves you numb. Neither is quite right. And neither is what most of us actually do, not the ones who have been around long enough to have been through a few of these stretches.
What we actually do is locate ourselves. We find our spot.
Hank found the cool tile. That sounds trivial. It isn’t. He didn’t solve the August heat. He assessed his situation and found the one place in the house where his particular body, at this particular age, could be at ease. There was intelligence in it. There was experience. He’s done enough summers to know that the tile in front of the kitchen sink stays coolest longest.
I’ve been trying to do a version of that myself. Not cool tile, obviously. Something more like: what is it I can still do well, in the time I have, with the people I have, given what is actually happening? I can read. I can think. I can write. I can sit with Susan on the porch at the end of a day and let the light go and not say anything that needs to be said. I can call Matthew on Sunday and hear what he’s teaching his students this year.
Those things don’t fix anything. They’re not supposed to. What they do is keep you present and whole.
That’s what I keep coming back to. The people who come through hard seasons without losing themselves aren’t the ones who had the answers. They’re the ones who kept showing up as whole people, every day, into whatever was happening. They read. They talked to each other. They cooked something. They noticed the dog on the tile.
I don’t know how this summer ends. Neither do you. But you’ve been through summers before. You know your cool tile. That’s not a small thing.
Dale Parsons
Editor-in-Chief
Charlottesville, Virginia
