Ode to Summer

There is nothing so wonderful for the soul as cloudless blue skies. Days when the sky is not simply blue, but a stretching infinity of pristine azure that banishes even the smallest white cloud tufts and with them all the worries of the world. The magic of summer is to me indescribable. It leaves me absolutely brimming with a seemingly boundless joy that lifts my feet to skip in delight and the corners of my mouth perpetually drawn into an eye-twinkling smile that swells from the very inner core of my being. “If summer could talk,” said Bern Williams, “it would boast it invented romance.” But summer can talk. It speaks in Pohutukawa flowers, the throbbing hum of cicadas, cool cotton dresses and the laughter of friends around backyards and barbeques caught on whispers of breeze well into the long and balmy embrace of dusky twilights.

There is nothing so close to perfection as a summer’s evening. Pearls of condensation glisten exquisitely on pints of alluringly cold lager, then, as though overcome with sheer exhaustion in the summer heat, drop rapidly down, leaving streaks of wheaten golden goodness. I love those glorious, deep-toned days of summer. When, from dawnings of amber to amethyst eves, you can’t help but smile and feel like everything is right with the world. Paradise is in those depths of summer when sun scatters its golden wealth with boundless generosity and there is simply nothing to do but shed worries like clothes and immerse oneself in the sea. Some of my fondest memories are of walking home from the beach on a summer’s evening, sand in sea-spun hair, salt on skin, listening to the syncopated thwack of friends’ jandals with one’s own. After a day of football on the sand, punctuated by episodes of screaming splashes of delight in the surf or audacious swims out to the harbour pontoon, it is impossible not to be contented with life and the warmth the sun’s rose kiss.

Summer is a time for friends to rub sunblock on your back, or chase you in mock indignation after you soak them unawares with a great splash of sea water. Summer is a time for Katchafire and the crisp and utterly divine sound of opening a bottle of cider. Summer is a time to savour- the leisure, the weather, our youth and those tantalising dribbles of icecream that escape over the edge of the cone. But most of all- summer is a time to smile. True summer is not in the climate, but in the happy dispositions the season brings. 

That is the romance of summer.

Summer time an' the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin' an' the cotton is high. Oh, yo' daddy's rich, and yo' ma' is good-lookin', So hush, little baby, don' yo' cry. 

Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward

In every girls life; there's a boy she'll never forget and a summer where it all began. - Anonymous.

Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. - John Ruskin

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. - Ada Louise Huxtable.