summer's slipstream

(one perfect summer)

I have always been looking for that perfect summer: one when the weather is sunny, but not too hot, I find a sundress that fits like it was made for me, and I feel brave when I wear a bikini. A summer with a festival, and evenings in pub gardens, with golden hour walks up the hill, swims in the sea, afternoons wandering around pretty French towns, and hours stretched on a sun lounger, reading an excellent book.

When I think of my perfect summer, memories drift by like summer ghosts: the summer-themed mix tape I made and listened to on a loop; the photo-booth in Florence I ducked into on a scorching day to take photos with the boy who would one day be my husband; the floppy straw hat I wore walking through a hilltop village in Tuscany, pregnant with my first son; the raspberries that my children—still toddlers, then—ate by the bowlful in the garden, giggling under a washing-line tent made from a purple floral bedsheet.

The air in the summer is thick with nostalgia—sticky like the pollen that gives my boys itchy eyes. Sunshine seems infused with a timelessness that makes me remember how it felt to be young. My endless teenage summers play like a coming of age movie on a reel in my head—the summer I stayed in Wisconsin with my aunt, wearing floaty dresses and carrying a stack of library books; the summer I kissed a boy in a field of haybales and daisies; the summer after exams, when we went to Spain and drank sangria, and I stayed lily-white as my friends turned nut-brown. But now I am older and my son—lips no longer raspberry-stained—is almost the age that I was then. Still, the dream-like days of summer are a period of joyful unreality—time folds in on itself and I feel the ache of days passing, carrying both the weight of summers past, and the hope of summers future.

I think of the summer we went to Crete and visited, for the first time, my Yorkshire Grandad’s grave. That was a summer of Greek salads, clear turquoise water and beach bars playing Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. My Dad lit a candle in the cemetery chapel, and I waited in the graveyard, where shocking pink bougainvillea trailed over a white wall. There was bougainvillea in Thailand too. I arrived there the summer after I turned eighteen and I stayed for twelve months—tipping over from childhood into adulthood. In weather terms, at least, every day was summer in what became simultaneously the most beautiful, and the most painful year of my life. Even now, spraying jasmine perfume behind my ears each day, I know I am trying to recapture the sensation of that year of forever summer.

Now, time seems to speed up—summer whizzes by and I feel caught in its slipstream. My urge to capture moments becomes stronger than ever—I want to hold this summer in my hand, to keep it just a little longer—and so I collect jotted words, endless photographs, and light-filled snippets of video. It’s something, but it’s never enough: in my mind, I preserve memories like flowers pressed flat between the pages of a heavy book. When I pull them out again, pale and paper-thin, they will be a translucent imitation of what they once were, but perhaps—on a bleak winters day—those dreams of sunshine will be enough to remind me that the next perfect summer is only ever months away.

Thank you for reading,

Laura

{ I shared the above image on Instagram, with the caption:

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.

One of the comments left on the post was ‘summer slipstream’, which inspired this piece—thank you, K.}