in the summertime

There's something inexplicably wonderful about walking down to the village in a sundress and flip flops, smiling hello at a few familiar faces from the neighborhood, grabbing an ice cream cone from the local shop, and walking back through the arboretum at sunset, aforementioned ice cream melting all down my hand and leaving a drippy little path along the trail.

It gives me a feeling of somehow ripening, of being bigger on the inside than on the outside; there's joy and hope and a head-over heels-in-love-with-the-world feeling that scares me a little - a swelling sense of the terrible wonder of being alive that presses against the little shell I've constructed to shelter me through the rough times of the past year.

Why is it so much easier to be happy in the summer than any other time? Part of it is simply that it's too warm to be bothered by much, and part of it is pure nostalgia; the happiest times of my life were spent in a place with long, hot summers that got started around April Fools' Day and stuck around until Halloween. I realize I'm treading on dangerous ground here; I'm hazardously close to rhapsodizing about the good ol' days, when I was a kid and a phone call only cost a dime. I'll keep an eye on it, and if I catch myself writing about how they don't make ____ like they used to, I promise to throw in the blog towel and get a job harassing kids on lawns instead.

In the meantime, I'll do my best to remember that even a belated break is better than none at all, and that the brevity of the New England summer only serves to remind me not to miss a bit of it.