On summer

There are so many reasons why I love the summer and most of them are cliches. I like how it’s slow and I like how it’s hot. I like how I feel like tearing through as many books as possible, a habit probably born out of middle school reading quotas. I like how coffee seems a little crazier to drink when you’re already hyper and burning up from the sun. I like how you feel things more, as though the humidity is extracting emotion out of your skin one drop at a time. The trees get really big. Berries. Bikes. Beaches. It all rolls in like a long-term houseguest who leaves fresh flowers on your bedside table.

I also fixate on how the season exists on its own plane—how the routines and flings and sunhats aren’t forced to merge into the patterns of the fall. An Albert Camus quote, drawn from “Return to Tipasa” and cheerfully reproduced on various Urban Outfitters posters, sets summer aside on its own as a separate, freeing thing: “Au milieu de l’hiver, j’apprenais enfin qu’il y avait en moi un été invincible.” “In the midst of winter I found there was within me an invincible summer.” Whether or not you have free time to waste, your life probably feels a little bit different right about now. It’s been moved into a different phase with infinitely better weather.

As kids, this was the time when a new Harry Potter book would be released and most of us would demolish it within hours and be left reeling with feelings for days after. This was the time that weird adventures in the woods could happen and we felt like maybe the animals were communicating with us (Just me? No? Probably.). This was the time when fruit was everywhere and people showed movies outdoors. For these reasons and probably some other cosmic ones, I have found that the summer is when I react and I feel the most deeply, not only because the weather invites nostalgia but because there has often been time to do so. You can look into someone’s eyes a second longer than is comfortable or block out an hour after your haircut so that there is time to cry about it. You can walk the long way home when you’re not rushing through the cold. By Jove, you can read!

Since the year has been broken up by my schools’ calendars (almost forever), it was never just “summer.” It was “summer break,” “summer vacation,” “time off.” As a rising senior—an apt designation, as though while waiting between years, I rise with the heat—these next few months have been pegged by myself and others to be the last of those summers “off.” But this has long since changed for those of you about my age, and even with a line drawn in the sand by finals week, the time isn’t really off, and it hasn’t been for a while. Not since we grew up a little bit and got jobs as ice cream scoopers and/or lab assistants. It stopped when work and and summer classes began to feel satisfying and fulfilling, more so than popsicles and grass and birds. Though I pride myself on my ability to be content with inaction, the two weeks in May before I started various projects were filled with boredom and guilt for not producing anything.

Those feelings, I am sure, exist for most of us during the school year as well. We let the fear of stillness be the thing that drives our daily motion. This is good. This is why the world works. This is why the world works after we do the getting older thing and don’t do the popsicle-grass-bird thing as much. But responsibilities aren’t dictators of seasons. Summer will still come around and take you to a different place. It can still be possible to go through the wardrobe of May and find your sweaty Narnia of June.

And now, the reason we are here in this section we call Recess—art! Brushes and pens and pirouettes. All these things exist year round, of course, and sometimes even flourish far away from the sun. But art comes with a built-in adhesive to stick itself on the summer shelf, and this is how it can be useful regardless of age. Digest some stuff, watch some weird movies, memorize a terrible song. Put it all on this separate plane and let it come back to you in a year. This lets you reap a little more significance, a little more memory out of already-meaningful pieces of work—and I have some pretty serious feelings about the "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" to prove it. Ensconce yourself in the comfortable embrace of the humid air until you are dripping with profundity. Then in September, dry yourself off, do school and do life. Wait a few months, and then it will hit you.

Georgia Parke is a Trinity senior and the Recess Editor.