{Summer Magic is a five lesson mini course of seasonal prompts and creative inspiration.}
Every season has its magic.
Summer’s magic is the longed-for joy of a life lived outdoors—the everyday delight of small, spontaneous adventures—eating lunch in the garden (or on a bench), taking a cold shower, slipping out after supper to watch the sunset on the hill. It’s summer treasures, found and shared: poppies in the park; a spot to paddle; that great ice cream shop; the beer garden with a view; a recipe for cocktail-shaker frappe. To me, the scent of suncream mingling with the smell of barbecue smoke is a kind of summer magic. So is the carefree feeling that comes of walking out the door without even a cardigan—in just a dress and sandals.
Summer magic can be found in nights spent under canvas—the midnight swoop of an owl in the brief midsummer darkness. It’s there in the quiet, dewy morning as I slice a juicy peach and eat it for breakfast. Summer days should pass slow and languorous, but they slip suddenly away—each one is a treasure. Now, more than at any other time of year, I find myself reaching out to try and catch memories as they drift away past me into the hazy summer sky. Swifts, all the more precious because of their threat of vanishment, dart past my window across that arc of blue. Summer mornings smell of roses, and summer evenings of jasmine.
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, clutching sticky lollies and 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 in the long grass—hanging out the laundry as my chickens peck happily around my toes, before I return to my desk with a glass of iced coffee and sit down to write to you.
Will you join me, and open yourself up to summer magic?