One more summer

“One more summer” gives the narrator’s fear of losing the aging Apollo both a measure and a limit. The phrase moves from an impossible wish for a life without separation to a smaller, dearly valued fact: Apollo has had another summer, and the narrator can say goodbye. Its return makes the season less a promise of rescue than a span of shared time that can be cherished precisely because it cannot last.

A Wish Against Decline

In Part Ten, the narrator confronts the visible changes in Apollo’s body: gray hairs on his muzzle, redness around his eyes, stiff walking, and days when he needs two efforts to rise. His arthritis has worsened in the six months since his previous checkup. The veterinarian’s list of signs to watch for in senior dogs turns ordinary observation into anxious vigilance; the narrator fears not only what illness might bring, but whether she will be able to care for Apollo if he becomes infirm.

The phrase first gathers force against that accumulating evidence. The narrator compares the predicament of anyone watching an aging pet to the poet Gavin Ewart’s wish that his fourteen-year-old, convalescent cat might have one more summer before the final journey to the veterinarian. That comparison makes the season a reprieve, not a cure. Summer stands for a finite stretch of life before an anticipated loss, and the wish for it carries the knowledge that another summer cannot cancel what the narrator fears.

Yet the narrator refuses to accept the limited bargain. Having been spared an earlier disaster—separation or eviction—she says that one miracle is not enough. Like the Fisherman’s Wife, she wants more: not merely another summer, nor two or three or four, but for Apollo to live as long as she does. The escalating numbers expose the distance between the modest wording of the expression and the scale of the desire behind it. A season can be counted; a life together cannot be made secure by counting seasons.

The Phrase Returns

At the book’s close, the wish comes back in a scene organized around one uncertain morning. The narrator had thought the moment of decline had arrived when Apollo left his breakfast untouched. She broke off a piece of her own breakfast bread and fed it to him by hand; he ate. By evening, his appetite had returned. The change does not resolve the larger fear, but it interrupts the immediate alarm: the sign that had seemed to announce an ending proves temporary.

The narrator then turns away from trying to settle the future and attends to the day at hand, a perfect summer morning. In that present-tense reprieve, the expression becomes a statement of what has been granted: “One more summer. At least you got that.” The words do not promise another season or claim that Apollo has recovered. Their force comes from the distinction between wishing for more time and acknowledging the time already lived.

The next image makes that time bodily and specific: Apollo lying stretched out, contented in the sun. The season is no longer chiefly a unit on a feared countdown to the veterinarian; it is an interval of comfort that the narrator can see him inhabit. The movement from medical signs and worsening arthritis to sunlight and rest does not erase the decline. It allows an ordinary pleasure to stand beside it, without pretending that pleasure amounts to escape.

Farewell and the Limits of Consolation

The expression also changes the scale of what can be hoped for. Earlier, the narrator asks why Apollo cannot die peacefully at home in his sleep, and why she must watch him suffer and die before being left alone. Against that fear, “one more summer” is painfully small. It cannot guarantee a gentle death, prevent grief, or spare the narrator the prospect of life without Apollo. At the ending, however, the narrator can say that she gets to say goodbye. The phrase thus accompanies not a solution to loss, but the possibility of meeting its approach with Apollo still present.

Its closing ambiguity is part of its meaning. The narrator wonders whether the words are addressed to Apollo or to herself, admitting that the line between the two has blurred. That uncertainty makes the phrase both an address to the dog and a form of self-consolation, without allowing the comfort to become a claim that grief has passed. Apollo’s returned appetite and his time in the sun are concrete; the future remains uncertain. By ending on the modest fact of one more summer, the book holds the narrator’s enduring wish for more time beside the time she has actually been given.