Summer’s visit is both amiable and oppressive: its sweet sap that envelops us in its hazy warmth is at first a welcome delight that, as the heat and humidity take their most formidable positions, turns cloying. Golden afternoons sweat away into slick, metallic evenings: city lights set against luminescent skies that fade fast into an inky black mimic the flicker of the lighting bugs that meander about the darkening fields and forests.
Summer is a time of repose and reflection, exploration and adventure, simultaneously melancholic and blissful; there is nostalgia in the quietude and freedom in the frivolity. It is a double scoop soft serve, offering relief and release. School is out, summer camp is in session, work has slowed, vacation is scheduled, days are long, the sun drags itself through the sky.
This underlying sadness to summer, heightened by the humid, suffocating heat, the smell of deet and campfire that cling to your clothes, the feel of aloe on burnt skin, wet bathing suits and sand in all the wrong places. The memories of summers past creep back to us, reminders that, under the stifling weight of it all, this time has a scheduled end date. Reflection and nostalgia bear memories of innocence, discovery, desire, eroticism and shame; a time when sand between the toes and mosquito bite-pocked skin meant more than just another nuisance in an overly-scheduled life.
