Nothing has happened for about three weeks and I've decided to leave it that way.
This is the flat part of the year. The middle of August, when the heat has stopped being a novelty and not yet started to break, and the days come one after another so alike that I have to check the phone to know which one I'm in. I haven't read anything that moved me. I haven't written anything here, as the gap above this post will show. I haven't been anywhere or done anything I could tell you about with a straight face.
My instinct, when a stretch like this arrives, is to treat it as a problem. To decide I've gone slack, lost the thread, that the not-doing is a slope and if I don't arrest it now I'll slide all the way down into a person who never does anything again. I get a low hum of guilt that I should be making more of the time, the way the long June evenings made me feel I owed them something. August doesn't even have the daylight to blame.
But I've been trying something this year, which is to not do that. To let a fallow stretch be fallow.
The word's a farming one and I'm leaning on it on purpose. A fallow field isn't a failed field. It's a field somebody decided, on purpose, to leave alone for a season so it could get back whatever the growing takes out of it. Nobody stands at the edge of a fallow field feeling it's let them down. They let it lie, knowing it's doing something underneath that doesn't show.
I don't know that anything's happening underneath in my case. That's the honest part. It might just be August. But I've noticed that the stretches I panic about and try to fix never improve from the fixing, and the ones I leave alone tend to end on their own, quietly, with some small thing catching my interest again before I've worked out what to do about the large nothing.
So I'm not doing anything about it. The soup is months off. The reading list has a single line in it for August and the line is about a book I gave up on. I water the plants and take the walk and let the days be indistinguishable, and I'm trying to trust that a person is allowed a flat patch without it meaning the floor has gone out from under her life.
Ask me in September whether anything grew. I'll probably have forgotten I wrote this.