Every season has it’s own brand of magic. Fall is orange and brown, all maple and apples. Trees begin to lose their touch with reality and let their leaves drift away, igniting magic in forests and cities alike. In the winter, there are deep blues and purples, grey and metallic white. Winter has a hard magic, but it allows us to gather in the warmth of our homes and revel in each other. In the spring, the magic is pink and yellow, robin’s egg blue; it’s the magic of regrowth – little furries crawl out to meet the sun, grass begins to shoot out of the ground. But the summer time…that magic is wild and honeyed. Green. Nature has become unruly and rampant, life is bowling over all that it can find. In the summer, people find their minds wandering to hobbits and wings while they chase fireflies in the fading day.
I live in the deep south – Alabama, thick in the throws of the sweltering and unforgiving heat. I’ve never lived anywhere else. Alabamians joke that Alabama really only has two seasons: hot, and hot with a side of a brisk morning that burns away by noontime. Growing up, I always craved the stability of defined seasons. I wanted to live somewhere higher on the map so I could know what winter actually is. Now that I’ve entered my late twenties (whoa, never thought I’d be saying that) I don’t mind Alabama’s indecisiveness as much. Sure, it’s frustrating when you want to go pick a pumpkin and it’s rocketing towards 100 degrees, and your PSL has actually just parched you further, but I’ve realized something.
It’s summer time right now. It’s hotter than hell come 7 am and the earth is dry and cracked – but when I look around, everything is growing. It’s brittle and stunted right now because the sun has no mercy, but I also know that as soon as a good rain comes, things will swell and burst through with abandon. I will look at the plants on my porch and smile, I will watch my dog wander towards the woods behind our apartment with curious and frumpy grace and the cicadas will be louder than they’ve been all season. The best part about the summer though, is that you can actually feel magic on the air. It’s closer to us during this crazy and unhinged time because there’s no reason for it not to be, which is why summer reading is the best reading.
Now don’t get me wrong – every part of the year holds its own way with the written word. But with the veil between us and an author’s imagination is so thin, it’s easier to imagine ourselves in different places and with different people. I rip through stories like wildfire and crave more, and more, and more until my brain is spent. I’ve found that when summer has finally concluded and my garden is all fading, I like to take a break between the “hot” of summer and the “slightly less hot” of fall because I’ve fallen in and out of love so many times with so many different characters in the long and languid days of high summer…but that time isn’t here yet. It is almost July and I know that the next two months will be slow moving and lazy, and honestly I can’t wait. My favorite part of June has been watching Cricket (demon cat #2) nap on the sunshine drenched carpet, watching Moose (demon cat #1) snoozing on Cory’s recliner (which is placed perfectly at the edge of the window), and watching Monkey (sneaky dog) smile from her pillow – all with a book in my hands. I am looking forward to another two months of the heat induced slumber inside my home because right now, magic is real, guys. You just have to open a book to find it.
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