When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. Summer flowers—petunias, fuchsias, geraniums—gush from other people’s window ledges. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street.
This past summer, I didn’t run the Upper Green, the Chattooga, or any of my favorite whitewater rivers, because my kayak skirt no longer fits around my pregnant belly. That’s what I say to my boating friends when they invite me on trips. But the truth is I haven’t been on rivers since before my body showed its tenant. I’ve been scared.
I circled the Vuarnet store in SoHo twice before entering, self-conscious for a variety of reasons: on one level, for instance, I knew I was too old to be shopping there. It wasn’t a holdover of the brand since its general disappearance after its peak in the nineties, as I had imagined it—a lone flag of consumerism planted for thirty fractious years among the boutiques and bistros of Spring Street. It was new since last summer, July 2018.
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