summertime

Lucky for me, all four of his hooves missed my body as they found the ground. I picked my head up, thankful I didn't get stomped, and watched the steer run off along the fence. Mental note: cows are not like horses. Don't let the big brown eyes fool you.

They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon__mells and sounds I__ grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air."When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free.As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms.

Back then, he'd have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became it's own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.

we met one strange summerin a regular tangle of sticky websyou had the air of angels sweet but I--drowned with the damned spiritsin lava oceans fearing your--foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes(I swear they are even if you--think otherwise): stormscalm ones, calmer than my--raging coals, empty and deadyou speak of souls like you believealways an optimist in pessimisticskin of ivory and titanium mesh...

Don__ forget the snow in the summertime, because you will meet him again when the summer is over!

O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?

Summer__ a total cocktease._ He shrugs, repeating himself. __t always ends._ He__ right about that. Summer always ends.

Summer brings sunshine, warm and flowering.

The day was so wonderful that Bonaventure thought it would taste like cherry pie if he took a bite of it.

Summer had a way of being full of fun and things to do and plenty of times of doing nothing and feeling bored.

The hours were long, but the days were short, and as much as I willed it to never come, the end of summer arrived anyway.

Somehow, the days of summer with their glimmering enchantment of dancing ladybugs and sailing clouds had faded into grey. Maddie__ heart had somehow faded with it.

Summertime is a period for youthful explorations, a joyful time when we learn lessons without grand expectations or harsh consequences.

Summers end to soon just as childhood ends before we apprehend the effervescent of our youth.

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.

Some of the best memories are made in flip flops.