#54 High Summer

High Summer.

Have you ever noticed that the season of our birth seems to creates in us a preference for that season? I’ve held this idea for a long time. Being a child born in the height of summer I relish this time of the year. I love warm nights and soft breezes, the kind that don’t require sweaters. 

I have lived in cold places and in each of these places I have craved the warmth of summer the entire year. This was strongest in the years spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and now here in Maine. High summer days astound me with their sparkle and feeling of abundance. The progression of fruits alone are enough to produce (pun intended) abundant indulgence; strawberries, cherries, raspberries, peaches and nectarines feel like health elixirs, the warmth of the sun still radiating from their juices. Nothing from a freezer’s depths can reproduce that fresh fruit joy.

Another particular joy includes summer storms, the boom and rumbling of thunder, the majesty of black clouds and flashes of light most often appearing on hot, muggy days. Such abrupt weather, sometimes violent, brings us an alive awareness with perhaps a touch of fear. And with luck there are rainbows.

“Swelter”, that overwhelming blanket of heat and humidity, is not as much a trait of summer in far northern climes but that duo arrives even here a few days each year. When the air is thick and the temperatures are hot it feels as if gravity has somehow increased. Summer feels less gentle in the more southern latitudes where’ve I’ve lived. The more southerly locations often had more frequent and more violent storms and oppressive stagnant air that preceeds them, but up north the windows are open to the sounds of birds and the breezes blowing through the house. Each day feels precious, like a lineup of jewels one after another.  There are so very few days of warmth in a year’s progression this far north that even sharing it with the pesky bugs seems worth it.