Dear Summer

I’ve grown too old for this summer feeling. These days I want the busy self-consciousness of fall, the staid dignity of winter—even spring is shy in its pastel colors. But you are the brazen season. You strip a person down to nothing but her temper, then lack the decency to look away.

I’m too tired this year to weather your presence—the quickening blood and startling heart, the sheen of sweat on skin that itches like an electrical storm. The sensory assault of summers past leaves me light-headed now: pipe tobacco and Banana Boat, citronella cutting sharp through the thick air. A whiff of pool water evokes the chlorine nightmare of a pool party at fourteen, shoulders curling against the clammy cling of a swimsuit still damp as a night chill comes on, and ash from a backyard bonfire soaks into tangled hair.

And the constant hum of summer insects echoes the dizziness of sixteen—the roiling frustration beneath my skin as I tried to understand what other people wanted from me and why I couldn’t give it. Far from the soft glow of springtime, your languid afternoons cast the world in a golden candy light bright as Technicolor, brash and insistent and unforgiving. Don’t think; act, you’d say. But I couldn’t do that. Mine is a measured mind, churning away at risks and rewards. You’ve always been too much for me, too urgent and impatient, and I hate to know my own weaknesses.

I suspect you secretly last longer than the other three seasons combined. You seem to slink in sweet as strawberry pie before your time and linger past your welcome like a headache. Yet people can’t get enough of your yawning days and short, sticky nights. You hold a tyrannical grip on the hearts of schoolchildren, wooing them with promises of ice cream firefly freedom, but you count your fee in sunburned cheeks and fevered whispers and carsick miles burned beneath rubber tires.

I’m old enough at last to ease into the spice-freckled arms of autumn, but every year you still thrust me into this seething, ceaseless mass of heat and vitality until I remember I’m part of the world whether I like it or not. In winter I can capture my passions behind a smile, but summer sets them loose as if a dam has broken. You are merely one more clever boy trying to unfurl me; I prefer to keep my secrets like the stars.

I should be wise enough by now not to fall for your tricks, but here we are again. You settle in like an old man in his rocker and let all your chirping creatures sing of times I’ve not been brave.