"Well, I heard they might compromise and plan for a long-term experiment to see what the effect would be on group health insurance."

"Don't you think it's obvious that Medical Savings Accounts would draw all of the healthy and wealthy people into alternate plans and leave everybody else in drastically expensive plans for sick, poor people?"

"No."

The fact is that there are serious things going on that people here know about, I dare say care about, but don't have the energy to talk about. We absorb summer stillness from the air directly into ourselves and manage to address what most people consider "reality" only in the future tense, imagining that hazy far-off time when our mind vacations are a memory.

There's something about the summer that robs the everyday of its gravity. It seems wrong not to linger over lemonade, not to spend weekends wandering towards the beach, or Sundays bringing back sand and sunburns and almost somber senselessness.

I never spent a summer at Harvard while I was actually a student there, but once I experienced Cambridge in the sunshine. Before my senior year of high school, I spent eight weeks living in Stoughton Hall and writing plays and absorbing an aspect of Harvard I wouldn't be exposed to again until Commencement, five years later.

Granted, since I wasn't a "real" student, I was inevitably going to be shielded from lots of grimness I would later find. And there were moments of atmospheric appreciation at other times while I was an undergraduate: Lowell House's small courtyard, accessorized with snow and red mittens, is perhaps my favorite visual image, along with the sight of the blue bell tower from the river (not a wholly ocular confrontation, I confess--this sight was always accompanied by some narration like "Hey, I know somebody who lives there.").

Nonetheless, the bulk of my best Harvard memories are from that one summer. They are visceral reactions more than memories. Instinctively, I imagine the Yard, hot and still except for dogs and frisbees, when I try to think of school and calm at the same time. Nothing was serious. It was too bright for that.

My friends and I were passionate about our playtime, not enough to use it well but enough to know that it should pass undisturbed. For me, that summer was idle, neither camp nor school. It was just...summer. The way kids' summers are supposed to be but hardly ever are anymore.

Then the mental stagnation made sense. No one really had much else to do except be hot in a dorm room and be glad senior year, with all its seriousness, hadn't quite arrived.

I loved that time, and reminding myself of it made me feel optimistic through 39 feet of gray slush four months a year. Recalling it made me stifle instinctive laughter when people who never had to wander in the winter would laud Harvard's beauty.

The sedate, always beach-like feeling of being baked is a summer staple. Floating through air that's almost thick enough to hold you is, to be truthful, something of a fine feeling.

I'm glad I have this summer of slow. Maybe evoking the vague vitality of these days will get me through my next tour of duty, an indefinite stay here. I'm excited for the time when the Washington World starts to move again. But I'm not too sad that summer in this swamp will linger well past the time Cambridge is crisp and cognizant again.

Tara H. Arden-Smith '96 was executive editor of The Crimson. She moved to Washington to write for The New Republic.