Summer’s Treason

Wally and I were halfway through our afternoon loop in the Dog Woods, ambling along the dappled trail where sunlight filtered through early spring leaves. It was one of those first truly warm days—when jackets feel unnecessary by mid-morning and the breeze carries not just birdsong but the scent of thawing soil, sun-warmed bark, and the first new fern fronds, reaching toward the sun and unfurling their filigree fingers as if to take spring by the hand and walk it toward summer.

That’s when we saw it.

A silent ribbon stretched across the path—sunlit and motionless. It wasn’t a dramatic entrance. No hiss, no strike, not even a flick of tongue. Just presence. Stillness. A living underline in the sentence of our walk.

Wally, to his credit, stopped immediately. His paws stiffened, his head tilted. He looked back at me with a mix of awe and uncertainty, as if to say, “Is this stick… breathing?”

It was our Emily Dickinson moment.

Dickinson wrote about snakes at least twice that I know of. In one poem, she refers to a snake as “a narrow fellow in the grass,” a line that still slides off the tongue like something slightly forbidden. In another, she calls the snake “summer’s treason.” That’s the one I always remember best.

I taught that poem for several years to fourth graders who took particular delight in the word “treason.” It was just the right blend of mystery and mischief. What else, I asked, could count as summer’s treason? “Summer school!” one called out, grimacing. “Sunburn on the first day of vacation!” cried another. “When the ice cream falls off the cone!”—an answer so devastating it drew gasps.

And they were right, of course. All of those things are treasons of summer. Small betrayals. Quiet saboteurs of joy.

But today, under a warming sky and with a snake sunbathing at our feet, the word took on a different heft.

Treason. In the grown-up world, it’s no longer about summer school or sticky fingers or stolen popsicles. It’s headlines and hashtags, and hearings. It’s the very real sense that something sacred—trust, democracy, the common good—has been slithered over, split down the middle, left to writhe in the heat of misinformation.

Emily Dickinson likely wasn’t thinking about rollbacks of protections for marginalized communities or mass deportations when she penned those lines in the quiet of her Amherst bedroom. But she was alert to the way danger can arrive unannounced, disguised as something natural, even beautiful. Her snake was a part of summer, but also its betrayal. It moved without warning. It unnerved. It reminded the careful walker—then and now—that not everything lying in the path is benign.

As we stood there, Wally and I, watching the snake stretch and shimmer, I felt a complicated cocktail of awe and unease. Isn’t that always the case with encounters in the wild? One foot in wonder, the other in wariness. I thought of Dickinson again, how she noticed the way the grass divides as with a comb, how the air recoils, how even the toes can feel a “transport of cordiality”—that strange bodily sensation that lives somewhere between fear and fascination.

Eventually, the snake slipped back into the underbrush, silent as a secret. Wally snorted at the creature’s retreat as if he were the boss of that snake, “Yeah, you better get on outta here!” We carried on.

But I couldn’t let go of the metaphor.

Because here’s the thing: treason doesn’t always look like what we expect. It doesn’t always wear armor or shout slogans or carry a flag. Sometimes it arrives in the slow normalization of cruelty, the erosion of truth, the rebranding of selfishness as patriotism. It can stretch across our cultural path just like that snake—calm, still, and catching the light in ways that make it hard to look away.

In that sense, maybe Dickinson was right to anchor her poem in the natural world. Maybe treason isn’t just political. Maybe it’s ecological, emotional, ethical. Maybe it’s any betrayal of what we know to be beautiful and true.

Still, I find comfort in the woods. In walking familiar trails with Wally, who doesn’t care about Supreme Court decisions or climate policy reversals, only about what smells interesting and whether there’s something edible (or at least roll-in-able) nearby. Nature, for all its drama and surprise, doesn’t lie. It doesn’t posture or tweet. The nettles sting, the birds sing, the snakes appear and vanish—and each thing means only what it is.

By the time we reached the end of our loop, the sun had dipped below the tree line. Wally’s ears flopped with each step. The memory of the snake had softened from sharp surprise to something more like reverence.

And I thought, maybe that’s what poetry does best—it lets us meet our moments with metaphor. It transforms the hiss of treason into a whisper of warning, yes, but also into a reminder: to walk awake, to listen closely, to notice the way the path changes—even when we think we know it by heart.

Today, summer’s treason was a snake. Tomorrow, who knows?

But for now, I’ll keep walking the Dog Woods with Wally. Both feet firmly in the present, and a pencil tucked behind my ear. Just in case.

Emily Dickinson Moment

Where shadow met sun
a shimmering silken whisper
Slender as a sigh,
spiral upon spiral, a question mark
scribed in living ink.
It did not dart but slipped—
an unfurling serpentine sash,

It slithered through the hush
with the slowness of something ancient,
more secretive than sinister.

Scaled, sleek, and sure –
An unforeseen splendor.
For a curious moment,
the world forgot its edges,
and we softly watched
each other unfold.

~Sara Harlan