Summer Magic

    

     Those magical, hot summer nights in my neighborhood as a child.  As I look back upon my life, nothing has ever compared to those days.  It was the wonderment of the vast, starry sky mixed with the scent of summer on the youthful skin of my childhood friends.  And in that time we really lived; we truly lived. 

     The blistering, sunny days seemed to be every day an eternity, and every night a quiet, cool communion with Him that created all that we enjoyed.  Summer nights still capture the majesty I felt as a child, whether it be in the warm, sticky evening breeze, sun-kissed, freckled skin, the feeling of vibrantly green blades of grass underneath me as I gazed up at the star-spattered universe, wondering about all the things that I still wonder about now.

     And while there are multitudes of moments composing my childhood summers, there is none so poignant, so perfect, than the hours upon hours I spent with my best friend in the enormous oak tree in her backyard.  It was a thing of true beauty and awe; it was as if the tree was a person, a tangible figure in the fibers of my childhood.  In the fall it would produce the most vibrant, fiery shades of orange, red and yellow.  And in the spring, the emerald green leaves seemed to sprout almost from nowhere, from the bare bleakness of winter, signaling a renewal, an insurgence of hope.  Those leaves were our guard, our shield from the world.  Once we climbed the trunk of the old oak tree, escaping into its branches like a bank robber on the run it was just us; the world disappeared into the distant background, and we were left there to contemplate life as we knew it.  Sometimes we would sit in the tree for hours, watching the musings of the neighborhood, the only communication being the mischievous, glorious glances exchanged between us.  We kept an especially watchful eye over the house we were convinced was haunted, and from our secret vantage point we watched it faithfully, anxiously waiting for our instincts to be confirmed. 

     Two doors down lived Fred Dixon.  He was too old to see us in the tree across the street from his house.  He had the most beautiful rose bushes in his well-manicured front yard.  His silvery hair literally glowed under the indiscriminate summer sun.  He looked like an angel.  When Mr. Dixon died, we missed seeing him tend to his rose bushes with his aged yet careful care and kindness.  The neighborhood was never quite the same; we were never quite the same.

     But what did remain was my fervent love affair with the ease, the lilting freedom of summer.  Summer is a song with the most simple yet delicate of melodies, accompanied by the fullest of harmonies.  The song is sung by the birds, by the swaying trees, by the smell of chlorine, the hometown Fourth of July parade, the lazy days of living.  It is there that the glories of life shine through, touching each child, leaving a lasting impression and a yearning for summer that never – no, never – fades away.