Summer

by J. C., Winsted, CT

Summer is summer. And once spring vacation is about a week over, every weekend suddenly becomes a taste; a luscious piece of summer, beckoning to us, saying, "Come, come, lie down in my warm, soft moss underneath the trees that go up and up and up and overlap infinitely, infinitely swirling around and 'round, until you are one alone, floating in space; but you can still hear the rivers swishing on fast forward and backward so far away."

Yes, summer is like a trail of sugar water left to collect ants by a crazed scientist; but water that gets less, so once you get to the last of the water, it only drops in beads of flavor which you lick up so fiendishly like an angry antelope: those are the weekends. Sweet, scrumptious bursts of that beautiful thing called sugar on your tongue.

And once you taste it, don't you just want more and more of it because it tastes soooo good? Like iced tea mix, Instant Lipton, on a parched tongue, to let the citric acid spark up those lazy spit glands. Yum, um, ummmm...

Or it's like the first few notes of the favorite, favorite song, beckoning out to summer - Please come! Save me from winter! But your cries are futile as winter envelopes you. You're still hung in suspension in March though, even though it's April, like The Cure, "It's so cold, like the cold if you were dead." You don't believe summer will ever warm your chilled ribs, so it is still beckoned in your mind. Just you didn't know it, because you never knew anything till now, but you saw it as that then, but now you see it was really summer in your mind, all those twisty thoughts. Summer comes closer and nearer, filling you up with no air to spare, and the mood shifts to one of a deliriously intoxicated state of the waiting; blissfully suspended in slow motion: a season on pause: "When I was a child I had a fever; my hands felt just like two balloons; now I got that feeling once again; I can't explain, you would not understand ... I have become comfortably numb." - Pink Floyd

May Day comes and now you are just wrapped in summer, but the school weeks just unraveled you a little, because you are so raveled and rolled from the two-day weekends with the crickets, that a measly, five-day week can't possibly untangle you enough for it to be winter again, so now you can feel summer, and not just wish for it, which is partly feeling anyway, just not really, so you feel irresistibly grasped within summer's clutches.

And suddenly you can see it. Alas! I am warm, in summer's cool watering, popsicle-lickish summer! Linkasticks, lanchechoon, hanashan, wraparoon, lanashen, lanchy, ranny. The words pour through your head like a cascade of cool, clear, perfectly formed marbles, on and on. Summer is there. You wake up with a cicada buzzing in your brain, and hear a mosquito in your ear in the hot summer night and forget February vacation because it is gone, it's gone forever, but that's good because now it'll never shave your face at the top of a mountain, or chill your meager skin covering again.