As it has always been, as it lingers in memory long after the crowd has moved on and the world presses forward in its icy, relentless current, the passage of time returns to the rearview mirror. It invites a quiet pause, a moment to see what was once plain and true, to hold the hand of a child you once knew, and to feel the first warmth of a summer surface again, as in that old poem that never truly leaves us.
Children carry an intimate truth about the sea: it belongs to them from the last days of June until the first hints of September. They measure happiness with the simple tools at hand, a bucket, a moldy-spread bucketful of sand, a hole in the shore that grows with each attempt to coax a shoreline treasure into a miniature universe. The essentials of joy are accessible, never more than an arm’s reach away, ready to be scattered by laughter or saved by memory.
The start of summer is a promise spoken softly yet with the certainty of sunlight. The Spanish writer Antonio Soler places the sun at the center of a life in his novel El camino de los ingleses, describing how the days arrive like tired trees that finally lean toward rest. And so it unfolds. From this moment until September, the days drift with that tired grace—like stones slipping into water, like the hazy, forgiving glow of evening light—and in the end, everything becomes a memory that grows richer with time.
One is drawn into a summer dream, at the very moment the season begins. It arrives as a weight of heat that seems to push a long road of white sand toward the horizon, as if a great bull rested along a plain, a dog shade-wrapped near a well, a vase of daisies waiting for attention. The season feels bronze, humming with the rhythm of a cistern, and is captured in the first day of school when a mother gently guides a child to new canvas shoes, bidding farewell to old winter clothes. It is a summer of light sweetness, marked by the first figs, and the simple arithmetic scribbled on a classroom board. It begins with the quiet of a walrus, only to crack into the lively chorus of the season’s end. San Juan’s heat marks the temperature with a breathless intensity, the solstice sealing the afternoons with a sense of lasting, almost sacred, stillness. Marble coolness greets the back steps, a tranquil shade settles by the portal, and days of play echo with laughter, bare feet, and the company of friends. Even the things that go unseen leave their imprint, quietly shaping who one becomes.
If such a summer has not visited anyone, the memory still claims a central place in life. Somewhere inside, a season of warmth and possibility lives on, ready to surface when the moment feels right. Perhaps this is the moment, perhaps this is the arrival that has waited for years, inviting a person to observe the world anew and to notice how the season continues to influence choices, mood, and perspective long after the days have faded.