The importance of rest

& a chill Sunday craft

Our favorite village witch, Isabel Walsh, reminded us this week in her newsletter of the need to slow down and get some rest in this hottest part of summer:

Late July and early August can sometimes feel like a time of brown-dried grass, early summer plants going to seed, and here in NC, a worry whether we have the stamina to make it through the rest of the hottest season with grace. It also might bring up a lot of climate anxiety: we can really see how hot everything is getting, just in how it feels when we leave the house, much less look at the news.

At this moment, I remind you: you know what’s on the news. You know how hot it is outside. We can’t do anything about these concerns unless we honor the quiet, internal energy of the new moon. This is a crucial part of the cycle, and one that we have the opportunity to remember every time that crescent wanes into darkness: rest and peace, independent of regrouping or serving a later purpose, are sacred. Ignoring these energies is what gets us into things like capitalism, and a plundering of Earth’s resources. We need you to rest, so that you can fight. But also because you deserve rest. As is often the case, it’s a both-and.

The news these days has been scary, from the devastating floods in eastern Kentucky to the deadly heat waves in Oregon and Washington to the out-of-control Northern California wildfires. All of these disasters exacerbated, if not directly caused, by the climate crisis. But Isabel is right that we can’t do much about this or anything else without the rest we need.

Resting is exactly what we’ve been doing this weekend. When Nana asked on the phone about our weekend plans, I was happy to say, “pretty much nothing!” Bea is done with camp for the summer, and I refuse to think about back to sch**l (at least for now). We’ve been playing indoor games, and loving this Forager card deck sent by former Chatham-dweller Lucy Bryan, whose beautiful new memoir-in-essays, In Between Places, is about finding meaning and connection through the natural world:

This has been another no-river-swim weekend, at least at our spot on the Haw, after some heavy but needed rain this week. As we shared last Sunday, heavy rains—especially after a period of dry weather—increase runoff from cleared land, farms, and roadways, and this runoff can be full of bacteria and other toxins. The river looks pretty normal now, but on Friday the water was so full of mud and silt it was reddish-brown.

Luckily we also have a membership at a local pool, so the girls have been swimming, which ranks high as a summer activity for us. I didn’t grow up with neighborhood pools, so most of the swimming I did was in the Mattaponi River or the lake behind our house. We didn’t have air conditioning at home or even at school, and I don’t remember suffering that much from the heat. It was all manageable with box fans, popsicles, and wild swimming.

Things are obviously different now, with our new-normal 40+ days of above-ninety degree heat. We have air conditioning in our house and in our cars, and the girls have it at school and even on the school bus. I don’t love the feel of constant AC, but last weekend I was reminded much we rely on it during Bea’s eight-show run as an orphan and servant in the Pittsboro Youth Theater production of Annie. The show was excellent, but it was so hot in the theater that first night that we were all using our programs to fan ourselves. After finding only one paper fan in the house (a really old and delicate one), we decided to make our own fans. Harriet and I made small ones, which worked quite well for the performance (Harriet made hers by attaching a clothespin to an accordion-folded piece of watercolor paper).

And then Bea and Harriet and I made paper fans as an indoor-outdoor craft this weekend. We adapted the fans we made from this video tutorial:

We actually found the string-tying in the video sort of difficult, so we made a larger version based on this tutorial:

Here’s how we did it:

1. Bea spatter-painted our white printer paper with blue Gansai Tambi watercolor. She says the trick is to use a lot of paint, and work outdoors. We let this dry overnight, and the paper turned out really pretty.

2. Take three pieces of paper, and fold them down the center (like the pages of a book). Unfold, then on the long side, accordion-fold the paper as neatly as you can. Trim any excess paper.

3. Next, fold each mini fan in half along the fold line made by your first fold. Glue the middles together, then glue each fan together.

4. We decided to reinforce our fan and add more blue by pasting tissue paper into each fan’s center. (This would be easier if you did this before you started accordion-folding the paper in the first place, but we were following our whims and it worked out fine! We could also see it being pretty with origami or other patterned paper, even magazine pages).

5. We didn’t have popsicle sticks, but we did have balsawood disposable knives. We cut them into popsicle stick shapes with scissors, then sanded down the edges with a nail buffer. This can be glued to support the edges or to make a handle. We left ours natural, but you could also paint it or decorate with markers. You could also make your handles, like in the video, or maybe use inexpensive wooden rulers (for a special “math fan” in your life?)

We were happy with how they turned out, and the girls have been taking their fans with them everywhere. There’s something so nicely old-fashioned and slowed-down about the breeze from a fan.

Maybe make some lemonade or sun tea to go along with that feeling? Or my favorite cucumber-lime-jalapeño cooler (I add seltzer instead of gin and drink it in place of iced coffee—very refreshing!).

Frog Troublers, we anticipate posting Tuesday and Friday this week—but if we don’t, you can imagine us resting and fanning ourselves in a hammock somewhere.

How about you? What’s your favorite restful summer activity?

P.S. Congratulations to Laura and Alex, who won the audiobook giveaway! I’ve been loving The Selected Stories of Grace Paley, read by Grace Paley (which really adds a lot to the experience).