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I feel cheated of summer.

We lost a month of it during our trip to the US in December/January, which YES was our choice–our choice to see family amidst the blizzards and reindeer of Park City, the deep freeze of Atlanta, and the comparable balmy temperatures (seasoned with Covid) of LA. Once we returned to Sydney, however, we had barely settled in before the driving rains showed up, sending cars floating past primary schools and flooding our cinema.

Yes, our cinema is ruined. The floor and halfway up the walls, anyway.

And this sounds like such an asshole anthem–“oh no, my private cinema is flooded!” What’s next–will the yacht spring a leak? (We don’t have a yacht.) For God’s sake, there’s a war going on. And a dear friend had, today, a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction.

I’m not into comparative suffering, though, so I typically just focus on my own. And right now, I’m driving around with an emesis bag in my passenger seat, left over from The Kid’s early dismissal from school last Friday due to “violent vomiting” (he sprung a leak from the other side on the way home). I wait as the gastro firing squad assembles, wondering which of us will get hit next (spoiler alert: it was Kevin the Dog, who barfed all over the house all weekend).

Little Brother is going through something with headaches and noise at school that may be a cry for attention, or may be anxiety (that’s what, after visits to the ENT and neurologist when I was his age, it turned out to be for me), or may be something else we haven’t gotten to the bottom of yet.

We’ve sat in crazy traffic three times in the past week due to an exploded water main one day, and environmental protestors the two others (they planted themselves on the road facing oncoming traffic, thereby ensuring that all the cars on said road stayed there longer, emitting their pollutants into the atmosphere. #makeitmakesense)

But. My friend still has a sense of humour. And though all my runs have been tired ones lately, due to who knows what–long Covid? Weather-related depression? The heaviness of living in a war-torn, broken world? The possibilities are endless!–they are hitting that part of the year when it’s not too hot, not too cold, and they start pre-dawn so that the sun rises on me as I awaken more with each footfall.

The harbours are still brown from the floods, but this morning I met a friend at the pool. And the still-lingering, occasional showers mix with a persistent sun to create double and triple rainbows, the kind that you get to stare at for awhile because your running is slow these days, and you notice those sections where the rainbow isn’t just one colour, but a few of them blending together: those less-defined areas that are more than just one thing. There is a moment when red meets orange, blue meets green, to become more than either of them is alone.

Then you notice, after you pause to take the photo, that it shows the rainbow ending in a trash bin. Which feels, somehow, right, that you’d have to dig through garbage to find the gold.

The day of the traffic delays due to protests, I could feel one boy growing silent with anxiety and the other inching closer to yelling because of it. I alternated between those two poses myself, trying to breathe and keep calm and carry on (which was the motto during a war, by the way) before I tried a different strategy.

“Okay, until the traffic clears we all have permission to use swear words,” I told them. And, that valve loosened, the colourful language emerged. We made each other laugh with the words I was so afraid to say as a kid myself, the ones I’d thought would get me sent to hell (or, at the very least, to an endless stay in my room). As war raged and surgeries happened and traffic shuddered, we called things what they were. Slowly, cars began to move. And we pulled up to school just before the bell rang, inexplicably and fittingly laughing the whole way.