The Bounty of Summer

An Ode to the Seasons

Time is such a strange and infinitely precious thing. How do you really measure it? By the hands of a clock? The pages of a calendar? The amount of grey hairs on your head and wrinkles on your face? It passes, no matter what you do, and no one knows how much of it they have left. Our job is to try to make the most of the time that we have.

One of the ways I feel time passing is by the seasons. Living in a place where there are four seasons, I find that each season has its own magical wonders. But sometimes my head would get so distracted, that a season would have come and gone without me really noticing it. Without really relishing it. So one day I decided to make a conscious choice to make the most out of each season, by doing the things that one can only really do in that moment in time, fully present.

The Bounty of Summer

Summer is very outward. If Winter is the quiet introvert reading a book by the window in the corner, Summer is the boisterous extrovert who wants to go out and do everything at once. Tempered only by the extreme temperatures that make one slow down (as people in the mediterranean well understand), it is the high point of the year that everybody has waited for. The fruits that have taken so long to develop, are finally sweet and ready to be eaten. Fruits that are imported because they are out of season, are picked before they are ripe and haven’t had the chance to develop their colour and flavour (with which come their nutrients), and so they don’t nourish us in the way they should. But when Summer is here the bounty is plenty.

Without realising people are taking better care of themselves. They eat less, they go outside more, they move more, they take breaks and go on vacations, they laugh more and dream more. In Summer we celebrate life in all its colours and flavours.

Summer is bare feet and condensed bottles. It is the contrast of the bright burning sun and the dark cooling shade. It is lightness as we shed layers of clothing and worries. It’s icecream running down our fingers as the heat melts it quicker than we can eat it. It is the smell sunscreen and the smell of BBQ; if you’re not cooking one of your neighbours is. It is cosy evenings under the night’s sky and sweaty nights under mosquito nets. Summer is loving and being loved, even if your only love affair is with the sun, who greets you warmly every morning.