Love List: June

a polyphonic fever dream | shooting stars & sea swims | witches with gifts

It is a quiet, dewy morning as, slicing a juicy peach to eat for breakfast, I watch swifts dart past my window across an arc of endless blue. In my mind, June’s days pass slow and languorous, but in reality, they slip relentlessly away from me — each lovelier and more fleeting than the last. Now, more so than at any other time of year, I find myself frantically clinging to passing moments, trying fruitlessly to catch them they drift up and away, into the hazy summer sky. In June, I hear the whisper of escape — I want the sun to touch my skin, I want to lie down in the long summer grass twirling a poppy between my fingers, I want to stay out all day long and soak up every second of midsummer light.

I feel, in the summer, that the membrane between moment and memory is paper-thin: I am living now, but also in all my summers that have gone before. I am a toddler, splashing in the stream at the end of my garden, and I am a child, sitting with my brother on a gate — fingers ice lolly sticky — watching a red tractor mow the field. I am a teenager, sleeping in a hot tent in my best friend’s garden, peering out at a cloudless sky from under the floppy brim of a purple patchwork hat, and I am here today — barefoot on the un-mown lawn — hanging sheets on the line and breathing the scent of white roses, before I return to my desk with a glass of iced coffee and sit down to write to you.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: