The world I
know best feels softer, especially in summer. Although, I’m still afraid of
snakes and I suffer in the midday sun, I can’t wait to get home to the places I
navigate by instinct, and know as second nature.
There the
water is gentler and the shade is sweeter. I know exactly the tree lines of the
horizon even as I turn away from them; it’s the east and west I've looked to
more times than anywhere else. I know what certain clouds foreshadow, and I
know what changes in the weather taste like on the air.
It is exactly how I
remember summer.
Of course, I
love summer for the sun that thaws out my now-southern bones. I like lazing in
the afternoon sun with my dog, lying around on the grass and not caring about
it sticking in my clothes. I like finally being able to swim again, anywhere,
salt or fresh. I like drinking a cold beer and holding the can against my
forehead between sips. I like John Lee Hooker playing while I’m making a cool,
fresh salad in the shade of the kitchen. I like reading All the Pretty Horses,
again, in front of a struggling pedestal fan. I like watching live music and
feeling crowded and humid and young. I like stone fruit and will probably eat
nectarines and cherries every day for the next couple of months. I like
everything blossoming and verdant and giving off the heat of life that is
photosynthesis, that is growing, that is energy transforming.
But most of
all, what I like about summer, is going home. It’s sitting on my teenage bed,
re-reading the books that changed my mind; it’s walking through my mother’s
garden, and stealing my dad’s tins of beer; it’s looking at the bones and
feathers and stones they've collected while I was gone. It’s the late sunset
finally hushing the unbearable cicada chorus in the bushland behind the house,
while we sit under lights in the back garden, ignoring flying Christmas beetles
and picking apart fresh ocean fish. It’s walking across the paddocks, sharp
with the sound of noonday crickets, to my sister’s house at the bottom of the
hill – the first cute and creaking farmhouse my parents ever bought – with her
dogs already out to greet me, and the plums and the mangoes and the mulberry
trees all where they've always been.
