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Summer, Once Again
Tribute to a Hallowed Time
The first bits of summer have rolled out on a green carpet thundering with freedom. I want to grab each day and hold it, make it last for a small eternity. Alas, time evaporates before me even as I attempt to run behind in hot pursuit. Every year, I’m amazed at how quickly it all slips away, vowing to squeeze the most I can from each and every golden day.
Most people where I live hate the heat. In fact, it has always been a litmus test for how long newbies stay in the north of Texas when they move here from another state. More than once, an exasperated transplant has asked me quite miserably,“Is it always this hot here?” Sometimes the heat gets to me, but it is a small price to pay for a brief breath of freedom and the blooms of promise that extend out over a summer.
It is within the golden days I wander alone, daffodils replaced by sunflowers, gentle giants of yellow redemption. And along these days, I go on a carousel of soul searching, promising, reflecting, and revising, wishing I could dig a hole into the core of time, and stay right here for just a while knowing full well that it can’t happen as all evidenced by childhood summers long covered by the sands of time: an abandoned farm, and a blackberry field long vacant, and a simple swing caught in the branches of a long-dead tree.
Coming back to my memory bank, another summer long ago sitting in literature class, shouldering a life still believed possible and reading words of a master poet, Dylan Thomas. These words drift back to me, summer beauty in notation, memories flooding my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks:
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
And there you have it, summer’s brief glory, the wild world indulging, but wishing to spin onward, faster and faster, losing us all in the drifts of time, and warning us to grab onto green promise while it is still there.
