Witness: Thoughts on Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day"

12 January 2026

Witness: On Oliver’s “The Summer Day”

Every day I walk the same 3.4 miles.

Last week, I saw a reel on Instagram of a traffic crossing guard stationed at a street corner for hours each day, who, in that one single corner never found the same corner twice. Her reel was stitched from innumerable clips of all the wild and wonderful and varied things she had the opportunity to witness there without ever stepping even a half city block away.

My husband regularly seeks a new running route accessible from our house. Three miles, four miles, six miles, he needs options and grows bored on the same route twice. Perhaps it goes without saying that my husband is my adventure. He would thrill if every day comprised some remarkable grand discovery, and so he seeks them. I am here for this. I am always here for him. I love it too.

At the same time, especially as now in my mid-forties, I find myself like the crossing guard, contented to bear witness to the same evolving street corner.

This revolution began when we lived in Albuquerque, and my writing desk overlooked the Sandias. I named the peak of this mountain range simply Sandia, personified her, and contentedly monitored her shifting moods: dark and broody, clouded-shrouded and enigmatic, radiant and life-affirming—and everything in between. Sandia, a rosy crystalline granite mount, had as many faces and moods as any human I’d ever encountered; in my study of her, she was infinitely complex.

These days, the view from my writing desk is similarly multi-layered: overlooking the quietest branch off a lake in rural North Carolina, I witness a panoply of songbirds and waterfowl, gangs of bandit squirrels, fisherpeople, and an ever-changing water’s surface (sometimes mirror-like and calm, other times rippled by wakes, still other times frothed by violent wind).

Something new and entertaining is always unfolding on my lake.

Two days ago, I watched from my back porch as a heron danced from foot to foot on a pink, heart-shaped innertube as he floated along, up the creek, past my dock. On the end of my dock, another great blue heron watched, awaiting his turn. These two dreamed of a flamingo’s life.

Last week, crappie moved through and settled in at the mouth of the cove across the way. With them came (no exaggeration) thousands of cormorants for the underwater hunt-and-feast and an equal volume of airborne ring-billed gulls to scamper after scraps. As one might imagine, the result was quite a ruckus of gull screeches, splashing, and the coordinated whoosh of non-jet-powered liftoff when I walked down to the dock and the cormorants moved out.

My daily walks take a similar tone. I don’t doubt these same-same walks would bore the pants off my husband—off most other humans—but no two treks are the same. Songbirds in condensed flocks are more vocal on overcast days; or they seem to be, but perhaps it is just the way low-hanging clouds muffle ambient noise and amplify their song.

A “wake” of vultures may feed together on a single squirrel carcass—roadkill—until I unintentionally chase them off. As a teen, I often stood in a lot just off the GW Parkway to watch airplanes take off from Reagan National Airport. If you attend close, when vultures cumbrously alight from the earth, these great birds’ wing feathers disturb the air in the same way I recall those jet engines did.

There are six dogs on my route, three of whose names I have learned over time: Lilly, Willy, and Sadie. Lilly, a Doberman, barks at me, no matter what, sometimes with a mouth full of ball. Willy-Dog, her mutt brother, just watches. A street over, Sadie, a brown pitbull with a white tummy, is tethered to a dog run. Most of the time, I find her dozing in her south-facing, sun-doused dog house; however, at times her owner is home, and I find her attending to him while he sits on the tiny, ram-shackle front porch of his disheveled single-wide with its cat-ravaged blinds and trashed-out yard. Sadie may be the sweetest sweetheart of all time. Not once, ever, has she barked at me. I’ve now met her twice out on walks with her owner, and twice has he permitted me to pet her. Deeply submissive, each time she rolls on her back and proffers me her belly.

Over the months since we moved in, I’ve watched a tree service maintaining tree growth around our power lines. I’ve seen clutter, debris, and trash accumulate alongside our roads. I’ve noted the comings and goings of non-year-round lake residents. And I’ve watched as used cars come and go from the old bait shop-turned-used car sales outfit out on the main road.

And…I’ve come across this poem by Mary Oliver:

Poem 133: The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

From New and Selected Poems, 1992. Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

In a world that wants to go-go-go, it feels right to resist.

There are days I’m certain I could match du Maurier’s description of a British garden in summer or Murdoch’s foliage or her algae-encrusted bell. But I am doubtful I could recreate these stories whole for their exploration of what is human: personality, intrigue, mystery, complexity, interrelation. These feel beyond my scope.

My mind prefers to focus on the grasshopper.

Could a novel written about a grasshopper have a future in this world?

Sometimes I think so.

Sometimes I think what the world needs most is a novel about a grasshopper; that it might be healed by narrowing its focus from a broken world-writ-large down to the unbroken life at our fingertips.

I lost many years of my twenties and thirties attempting to do it all. But now I read Oliver’s “The Summer Day” and find camaraderie and relief in her acute sensitivity. It’s not simplicity. It’s an acknowledgement, rather, that the complexity of this right here is equally important. Or. Even. More important.

~M