Summer in anticlimatic

“Then followed that beautiful season… Summer…
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
and the landscape lay as if created in all the freshness of childhood.”
-Longfellow

Doubtless I’m not alone in my flashbacks to simpler days during these locked down times. It’s tough to say which season memory clings to the easiest. Certainly autumn and Halloween are contenders- winter evenings as well, and its bright white days I suppose- in fact it may be easier to list seasons which struggle to leave romantic impressions. Sleeting November, for certain. The dirty end of winter. Late august when anxiety over the approaching transition distracts. Definitely not late June. Late June is as pure a seasonal magic as can be had, at least in my little corner of the world. Maybe its the lilacs, maybe it’s the promise of beach days and star gazy bonfires to come…or maybe it’s the ancestral memory our childhoods brushed up against the first time we touched spring with our young senses.

I think of a willow tree next to a deer park, and a vast body of tall pale green grass bent over at the sky, like the willow, reaching down. The smell of it. Carpets of life strewn about in layers round the sphere of my known existence. I remember being very impressed, though I wish I could remember in better detail. I wonder if it seemed as familiar as it did novel- something, somewhere, I had been before.

As we look forward to this coming June under novel times once again, I can’t help but hope that magic will be there waiting. When novelty meets the familiar comforts of the season, will it open a spiritual axis point within us somewhere? Connected across centuries of blood rolling backwards to Adam. If so, it may be something to look for this June on quiet night streets of overgrown memory.

Last updated April 24, 2020