I’ve been thinking a lot about summer recently, mostly, I suppose because she came on quickly after many weeks of wondering if she ever would and all a sudden, here we are in the season’s midst.
There is this urgency to summer that doesn’t seem to exist within the other seasons and it weaves a strange sort of frenzy through June and into August. It’s strange, isn’t it, we don’t in say, January, start panicking that winter will end? We don’t begin to frantically plan all the trips we can outdoors so we can make use of our scarves and heavy coats. We don’t grieve the end of early darkness or shivering as we step outside in the early mornings for work? And yet, I feel like we tend to half -mourn summer’s end before it begins and that is why I suppose there is this frenetic quality to the season. There’s this hurried pressure that begins to accumulate as temperatures edge toward ‘warm’ which after the first truly hot day, implodes into ‘THIS WILL BE THE BEST SUMMER YET’. Suddenly the trains are packed with people overloaded with towels & coolers, limbs lathered in SPF as they cluster at fast speed to beaches outside the city. Terraces even on weekdays and even before lunch hour are littered with laughter and ice-crammed drinks. Pool rooftops resemble animals finally finding water in the Sahara: clusters of dehydrated souls, woozy, sun drunk, and basking as they drape themselves at the water’s edge. The airports are a hysteria all of their own, an incessant wave of wheeled suitcases and sunburns that come & go in overwhelming tides on the hour, every hour of every day of this season. I often, while walking around this city, cannot help but love this palpable delirium. I’ve always thought of it as the happier version of Seasonal Affective Disorder, instead of depression, we run around like lunatics grabbing whatever we can from these warm, longer days. And that right there, is why summer is my favourite season. She’s manic and sexy and an adventure but one that will leave far quicker than it took for her to arrive.
3 Comments
Leave a Comment