On Summertime (Discovery 8/12/09)
What makes summertime the most magical and sets it apart the most from the other seasons is that every single day we are somehow aware of its passing. Every blessed day we have knowledge of the summer slipping away and whether we know it or not our bodies are filled with some strange mix of hope and dread for what lies ahead. As much as I love all the seasons there's something about summer that moves me to the core. I think it’s the way the mist slithers over the mountains like breath, as it did this morning. Or maybe it's having the company of cicadas—I am comforted by them every night as they remind me that someone else, something else, is there. Or fried green tomatoes. Or the freedom of swimming. It's hearing the nostalgic bounce of the basketball where the boys are playing down the road. The beauty of seeing people tap their fingers on the steering wheel to a loud radio while their arms are propped up on their open car windows. Perhaps it’s the way the gloaming stretches out longer and noisier in the summertime. No matter what it is, summer is fleeting, it’s always leaving us, it’s inching closer and closer to fall and winter, those two harbingers of change and death, and all the while the summer is actually the great big reminder of things moving on too quickly, the reminder that nothing gold can stay.
Comments
Sandra
I once tried to write a similar piece about the magic of summer, but I fell far, far short of what you've written here...which makes sense, since you are a writer and I am not!