By Allison Shaw
I wish that I could bottle the way the air smells in the summer, somewhat sweet and definitely hot. There’s beauty in it, the longer days, the peachy-orange sunsets, the feeling of the sun on your skin right as it starts to burn. Sitting outside in the late evening in the humid air, getting bitten by mosquitoes and watching younger siblings and cousins run around the yard catching fireflies and playing with sparklers. This being my last summer as a college student, it still hasn’t necessarily hit me that I likely won’t experience summer in the same way again, just like I no longer experience it as one of those firefly hunting cousins, with their grass stained shorts and scraped knees.
There is something to be said for the cultural impact of summer in America. If I was to try and think of a season that seemed to be the most American; it would indeed be summer. All of our great American dreams happen to take place in the summer; a backyard barbeque with burgers and dogs sizzling on a grill, perfuming the air with charcoal smoke and the smell of seasonings. Walking along a boardwalk, with a ferris wheel in the distance, trying to eat a melting ice cream cone before it drips all over your hands, making them sticky while you laugh with a friend. When the sky lights up for that one week every year, in all sorts of colors, and that unmistakable pop-pop of gunpowder and round accompanies it.
The imagery of summer has this sense of Americana in it, this mixture of nostalgia and patriotism, like an old polaroid picture of a Fourth of July celebration with a filter on it due to the age. When I think back on summers past, I realize that even as I age, as I grow to hate the heat, as I begin to work jobs for some spending money, as I lose a true “summer vacation” when I enter the next phase of my life, there is something in the the summer that I can still hold onto; those snapshots of the idyllic, American summer, with all it’s melting ice cream, fat mosquitoes, and fireworks.
