where do you summer?
on summer selves, bikini bodies and lessons from the only season we turn into a verb
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“Where do you summer?” is a question usually asked by and of people with multiple homes, one of which is reserved for the warmer months. Summer is the only season we’ve turned into a verb, but even if you don’t own a house on the French Riviera, there is still a place where you summer and it’s different from where you spend the rest of the year.
Summer is, without dispute, the year’s youngest child. We pay an extraordinary amount of attention to it. We dote on it with the tenderness of a parent who’s learned the hard way just how quickly children grow up. We savour each day, acutely aware of how temporary it all is. Perhaps that’s where so much of summer’s charm comes from. It carries within it an element of memento mori – a constant reminder of impermanence. Every summer joy comes with an asterisk attached, a line of fine print informing us that these golden-hour evenings expire with the season. Until then, you are welcome to revel in their splendour. Perhaps that’s precisely what makes it so intoxicating.
Even if, like me, you belong to one of the other seasons at heart (perhaps autumn and its delightful, bittersweet atmosphere), summer’s allure is truly difficult to resist. It hangs before us the ripest versions of life: adventures, pleasures, possibilities. In a way, it’s the only season that acquires the qualities of a place. Its national colours are turquoise, lemon yellow and sun-bleached white. It even has its own national anthems. Spotify supposedly hosts more than 60 million user-generated playlists featuring the word “summer”, vastly outnumbering those dedicated to any other season and cementing it as our undisputed favourite.
The summer months consequently occupy an absurd amount of psychological real estate relative to their duration. By mid-February, our social media feeds begin filling with summer plans, plans to attain summer bodies and the holidays on which to take them. We begin counting down to it months in advance, chasing it with the anticipation usually reserved for places rather than periods of time.
We love summer so much we carve out a separate body for it. You might argue that’s only natural – it’s the one season that leaves us with few layers behind which to hide our curves and edges. Even so, it’s curious that we treat our physical selves as fundamentally different for just a few months of the year. Then again, we’re not the only species to do so. Many members of the animal kingdom adapt their bodies to each season. The snowshoe hare, for example, swaps its winter coat for a shorter, reddish-brown one in summer and grows longer ears to shed excess heat. Humans may not moult, but we, too, seem determined to become a little lighter before summer arrives.
It’s not just bodies that become lighter, everything gets curated around lightness and ease. We have summer reading lists full of delicious, easily digestible novels – stories so light they won’t weigh us down by the pool, so much so that we’ve nicknamed them beach reads. There are summer recipes, summer cocktails, summer haircuts. There is an entire category of fragrances built around the promise of smelling like summer itself – just a little more sophisticated than sunscreen, with an extra touch of salt and coconut. There is even a lighter version of love reserved for the season: the summer fling, a romance with an implicitly limited shelf life. Some summer romances outlive the season. Others don’t and extending them can be a little like keeping the Christmas tree up until February.
Far from the time for reinvention, summer is the time when we revel in the self we’ve been refining during the three seasons that came before it and we allow ourselves to just be. We stop looking inward and focus on what’s happening on the outside. We permit ourselves departures from our usual selves: working less, drinking more and sitting in the sun longer than we should. All those permissions and all that ease create ideal conditions for serendipity and therefore possibility. Meeting friends of friends at BBQ parties, unexpected conversations by the hotel pool or on the plane with the person sitting next to you.
Summer is also a feast for the senses, which may be why it leaves such vivid memories behind. Heat makes smells more intense and because smell is the sense most directly connected to the emotional memory centers of the brain, it becomes a particularly powerful trigger. The brain also pays special attention to things that stand out from the ordinary. And because summer often means escaping daily routines, traveling, or experiencing new sights and textures, these novel experiences leave deeper imprints on the mind. Heightened emotion alerts the brain that something is worth keeping. Summer supplies both in abundance: exception after exception wrapped in freedom, joy and connection. Longer daylight hours help regulate your circadian rhythm, improving the sleep needed to consolidate those memories.
Perhaps it’s part of the reason we grow nostalgic for particular summers, like the summer of 2016 or the Summer of Love in 1967. The winters end up blending into one another, but you somehow remember the summers quite distinctly: the self you inhabited, the beach read that kept you company by the pool or the love you were falling into.
In essence, I think summer is the only season we not only experience but also embody. Perhaps that’s why we turned it into a verb. Summer isn’t simply a time we pass through but something we actively participate in, and delight in doing so. Now, there are some people who revel in walking through walls and have made summer their permanent residence. Those who live in California. Those who spend the colder months in the opposite hemisphere, returning only once the sun is etched back onto the horizon. I’m grateful to live in a world with summers, but I wouldn’t trade the other seasons for the chance to join them. They are what makes summer possible. In Venice Bitch, Lana Del Rey sings, “As the summer fades away, nothing gold can stay.” I suspect she’s only half right. Even if our summers come with return tickets, there are a few things worth bringing back with us.
For one, summer is a reminder that life itself is seasonal. Different seasons ask different things of us, and perhaps fulfilment comes from embracing each one on its own terms. Erifili Gounari wrote a beautiful essay on this, which I highly recommend as follow up reading.
Summer is also a reminder that the closest thing we have to slowing time down is experiencing new things. Novelty is how we avoid waking up one day wondering where the hell the last twelve months went. (We probably still will, but at least we’ll have enough memories to prove the year didn’t simply slip through our fingers.) It also reminds us that, however solitary we imagine ourselves to be, life is always better when shared with people who understand what we’re talking about and with whom living feels light. We often talk about romanticising life, but perhaps it’s something slightly different. Perhaps it’s about fully committing to the chapter we’re in. Summer makes that easy. We curate playlists for it, search for recipes that taste like it, wear perfumes that smell of it and shape our lives around it. Maybe every season of life deserves the same devotion. Perhaps the goal isn’t to summer all year round. It’s to learn to inhabit every season as completely as we inhabit this one.
Further follow up reading:
I don’t think I ever mentioned that I admire the covers you create, although I hope they are not AI (if they are, they’re the better kind that I don't dread to look at).
You’ve created a consistent and distinctive style that is unmistakably yours across the publications I follow, and I think that’s great. I can also imagine how much fun you must have creating them. which is even better.
I salute you, keep it up!