August Is a Different City

There is a version of this city that only exists in August, and the people who live in it all year have complicated feelings about it.

The August city is more crowded, more expensive and much more social. It runs later. It eats better, because visiting relatives are cooked for. It also runs at a pitch that is exhausting to sustain and that stops abruptly in the first week of September.

Two calendars, one month

The visitor's month is compressed: everyone must be seen, every obligation discharged, every place revisited, in three weeks that have to carry a year.

The resident's month is the opposite. It is the month in which ordinary life is suspended in order to receive people, and in which nothing else gets done — which is fine, and is understood, and is also a real cost that nobody itemises.

The visitor is compressing a year into three weeks. The host is giving up three weeks of a year. Both are correct and they are not the same transaction.

Almost everyone we spoke to on the resident side said some version of the same thing, and said it without resentment: that they would not trade the month, and that they are tired by the end of it, and that both of those are simply true.

The one complaint that came up repeatedly was smaller and more specific. Visitors, they said, want to be taken to the places they remember, and will not be talked out of it — even when there is somewhere better that has opened since.