Treachery

 Summer can't be managed, conquered or domesticated.  It stings you every time.  This most treacherous of all seasons starts slowly, lulling you into its grasp with balmy June breezes, lemonade on leafy green afternoons, glittering blue water serenity and crickety dusk that goes on for hours.  You totally fall for it, because winter and spring never loved you like that, never treated you with such...tenderness and warmth.  You can feel all the stress and tension of that cold, stifling relationship with winter literally melting away in the heat of the very long days.  You begin to recover from the rebound fling you had with spring, the one that ended with frozen daffodils and broken dreams.  Spring is much too flighty for a serious relationship.

Summer seems weightier, more permanent, as if its heat and intensity were enough to keep it grounded forever.  Summer isn't in a hurry to go anywhere.  It seriously doesn't have plans.  Summer is here to do whatever you wanna do, as long as sunglasses, cold drinks and flip flops are part of the equation.  Summer sears through you with glorious sundrenched apathy as you hazily envision a future with no responsibilities other than hanging out poolside with summer.  You truly start falling in love.

Before long, though, summer starts to crack.  You don't want to see through the sunny facade, but you sense a crispness in the air.  There is a restlessness that wasn't there before, and you fight it.  Oh, you fight it.  You can save this relationship! Yes, you can save your relationship with summer by slowing down time and appreciating each crystallized, sun-drenched moment. If you can just get to the pool earlier, go to the beach more often, enjoy evening a little bit later, hike higher, paddle faster, barbecue hotter and road trip longer.

And that's how summer, that perfidious trickster, becomes a frenzied, chaotic, chlorinated, sweaty, beautiful mess before it violently slams the door on you and vanishes, screaming something about Australia and a clean slate.

Abandoned, you hang your straw-haired, sun damaged head and wipe away sea salt tears under the tumultuous, once-azure sky.  Then something colorful catches your eye.  You dab at a tear and look up.

And actually...autumn is looking quite fetching with that tinge of gold, that hint of crimson on its blazer...