It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
Ray Bradbury
Dandelion Wine
The following column ran in 2021 and is included in the “Summer” chapter of my book, “Our Town Oak Park – Walk with Me in Search of True Community,” (available at The Book Table):
The much-maligned season of summer has been with us since Memorial Day, when we finally bid the 40s a not-so-fond farewell. We can complain only about the heat now. I complain only about the cold because it dominates two-thirds of the year. Heat can be withering, but it will depart too soon.
I complain about weather most of the year, but in summer I’m in full praise mode. It’s all about warmth. In winter, I praise relative warmth (even the 40s get their due). In spring, I praise grudging warmth (the sun is trying, it really is, as it creeps north, inch by inch, measured along the western horizon). Or, as my grandson Tyler said, when I noted that the sun was trying to break through the clouds, “The sun is always trying to break through.” Good point, and a good way to look at life.
In autumn, I praise lingering warmth as the feckless sun plots the annual escape to its other lover, the Southern hemisphere.
In summer, though, warmth rules — and can be forgiven, in my opinion, if occasionally the heat index gets carried away. You never hear anyone say, “Gotta savor winter because you only get so many in a lifetime.” People do say that about summer. I do, anyway.
I love lukewarm summer mornings, bordering on cool, rousing the birds at 4 a.m. to their morning psalms, sweetening the soft air with song in the grey pre-dawn. Summer offers a largesse of daylight hours — so jealously guarded until just recently by winter’s austere, dark dominion. Early morning is now a viable option, inviting emergence from the cocoon of our bedding, giving us reason to rise, if only to sample and savor the awakening world, runners and walkers and their dogs, and workers setting about their daily commerce.
No price is exacted for getting out of bed on a summer morning, no chill tempts us back under covers for a few more comforting moments, forcing a daily battle of will vs. chill. In winter, getting out of bed is an act of moral courage. In summer, it is effortless.
Summer’s early morning light steals into the room, coaxing sleepers awake well before the alarm clock sounds. Opening blinds reveals low-angled sunlight, illuminating every crack and crevice in our paved paradise, bathing the world in beauty, transforming our eyes into visionaries. The more you see, the better you’ll like it, the sun seems to say. Why let an hour lapse? If you can’t get out, sit by an open window and watch the world flow past.
I love the evening warmth as well, but more than that, the light. In June, “night” is a relative term. The day’s afterglow lingers past 9 p.m., extending boldly east along the northern horizon. Daylight lasts from 5 a.m. till 9 p.m., 16 hours at its solstice peak. Balmy nights feel friendly, luxuriously perfumed by June flowers. Walking at night is to conduct an olfactory tree inventory. The leafy extravagance merges into an undifferentiated mass in high summer is categorical during the June blossoming: catalpas to lindens to black locusts and horse chestnuts.
With the arrival of fireflies, it’s tempting to wish we could do without streetlights altogether.
Summer afternoons, admittedly, are an acquired taste, but the sun overhead bleaches cumulus clouds and thunderheads, adrift in the blue vault. The midday heat can be an ordeal, but that’s why trees invented shade and why people invented front porches. The formerly frigid dead zones of winter are transformed into leafy oases that sway in the breeze and let in just enough dappled sunlight to make even sidewalks dance with fancy finery.
In summer, interior living spaces too often become air-conditioned fortresses, but when temps are tolerable, opening the windows that run the width of my living room draws the outdoors in, reminiscent of summers spent reading on an enclosed porch, growing painfully up, socially awkward, turning inward — into books, but also into summer itself. Instead of fretting about how many books haven’t been read, better in summer to content ourselves with the Book of Nature.
A summer afternoon’s deep stillness is worth the walk — dodging the lawn care services that compete to out-decibel the cicadas with their infernal noisemakers. In the evening, the ethereal balm of crickets arrive to soothe assaulted ears.
Handling the afternoon heat requires cultivating a comfort level with the fine sheen of sweat, our breeze-activated cooling mechanism (more efficient than the dangling tongues of dogs). At a certain point each summer, who can recall the last time a jacket or coat was necessary or what it feels like to brave an icy wind?
Summer is stingier with rain, more generous with sunshine. The grass browns, but the lawns are white with clover flowers, and native prairie plants with deep roots grow tall, where allowed. All feels full and right with the natural world.
After dreaming of this so often during the long 7-8 months of late autumn/midwinter/early spring here in the upper Midwest, we are gifted with four months of non-chilly, non-overcast, sun-basted weather to savor — five if we’re lucky. Sans smartphones, unmediated by windshields and A/C, summer is a lovely space and time that should never be taken for granted.
Let the water sprinklers strafe your legs as you pass, contemplate caterpillars dangling over the sidewalk by a silky thread from the tree above. Learn the names of roadside wildflowers — purple chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, purple coneflowers.
Sample summer’s buffet. Inhale its bouquet.
It’s summer. We get just so many in a lifetime.
See you on the porch.