Summer

Happy summer solstice. I love summer. It's my favorite season. I love the extremes of it: the extreme heat, the plants drying out and turning to seed and sending lesser versions of themselves out into the world in floating billowy parachutes, or many-fingered sails, or hard pods, or dried, indistinguishable fruits, or thorns that grab onto your socks and insist upon your ankles their removal. I love the sound of withered grass in the breeze. I love the idea of a blanket under a rustling oak tree in the warm tangerine slant of a 7pm sun. I love the persistent, mechanical sounds of hard-shelled insects. Warm stones. Cracked dirt. Trampled eucalyptus. A quiet tide, low or high, it doesn't matter. I love summer.

Enjoy the heat wave. I am. I think summer is smiling down on us, knowingly. The red line of my thermometer has risen past the gauge that only goes as high as 90 degrees, and still the mercury has climbed into an upper register that we mere mortals can't appreciate. Hopefully Mercury will return from its journey into higher places and will sit at our feet and tell us great stories. Maybe it will tell us what the earth looked like from afar. How it shimmered. How the stars burned themselves in the atmosphere. How the lights of cities glistened; water cupped in the hand.