I’m sprawled out on one of those long chairs they always have at pools. What’s it called? Sun-chair? Lounge-chair? I would have called them pool chairs; ‘cause that’s the only place you really see any more than three of them at a time. My brown bikini complains about its duties, ever the troublemaker with the constant rising up or drooping down. My book, a hundred-or-something years old, sitting on my lap, my eyes making the words turn from black to red in the sunlight.
Bringing my arm to my face, I can smell the Coppertone that has always been a perfume to me, guarding my skin from baking for now. Nodding my head in time to the music pulsing from my earphones that snake down my stomach, my sunglasses bob sequentially down my sweating nose, needing to be pushed up from the edge every few minutes.
My legs sting with the sudden cold of water droplets from a kid belly-flopping make me flinch from not hearing the warning splash. It’s a reminder of what my hemisphere just got out of: the ever-melancholy winter, with little heat and even less snows. I used to think of that as the best season of them all; everything frozen in place, bared down to its bones, showing the raw soul of the natural, the ever-present, and the unappreciated.
But I see now, as I do every early summer afternoon, that summer is when the souls make something of themselves. They bring forth what dies of them in the winter. They reclaim what they’ve made of their lives, like so many people try to do.
All at once, I feel so whole. Not even whole, it’s so hard to describe. Just content. Complete. Like there’s no evil in the world. No cold in the corners of the shadows. For summer shadows are just proof that the sun is shining today. Summer shadows are for cooling off. The summer sun is for glowing. The summer sun is for basking and rejoicing that it’s returned with its full force that it’s been hiding all year. Like it waits on purpose for the world to want its presence, so the world never takes it for granted.
For the sun is ostentatious. It likes to show off and shine on days when the weather man predicts storms. Even when there are storms, it likes to come back, shining just as brilliantly as it was before the clouds. As if to say, I’m still here. No need to worry.
As if to say, “Don’t you know I always win?”