Face your daylight horrors!

This past weekend was one of happiness, and it was filled with beauty, and it was summer. It is summer and so every day should feel like summer, but it felt so much like summer in the way that you will remember a summer after it has ended; the kind of days that will linger in your memory more than others.

Mira and Emilia picked us up at the airport in and old, run-down car, red with a cracked wind-shield and damaged seat belts, a car only suited for slowly driving around the countryside if it has to be driven at all. It was the first time I have ever ridden a car without having a seatbelt on, and it felt like summer. We rolled the windows down and I breathed in the wind and the scent of all the flowers lining the roads, and my head was full of summer. We went slowly due to the seatbelt situation and it allowed me to drink in all the beauty of a new place and the season both, and my heart came alive with a joy I had not felt for too long.

We stayed at a summer house with three rooms, and I slept in the lightest, brightest one, with a big window with a blooming white lilac outside. The nights never got dark and so I could listen to the birds singing as I fell asleep, and breathe in the scent of my favourite flower even in sleep.

In the mornings there were open windows, squirrels and birds, and time spent with friends. As the day went on I gained new ones, and I was happy. We ate lunch out in the garden and spoke with different accents about the same things that we all love, and Mira went inside to get me a hat to shield me from the sun. I let my hair down to be able to keep it on and felt like someone could paint a picture of us, and it would be the very image of summer. We were the very image of summer, then, as I see it and want to remember it; so many different people in the sun and the grass, coming together to share something loved.

I loved the people and I loved the art. Oh, all the art! The sculptures and the paintings, all the new styles I had not seen before, and we admired each others’ work and each others’ favourites, and I fell in love with a model made by a new friend, and before she had to leave at the end of the show she sold it to me and I will keep it forever. I wrote down names and addresses, I found beauty in art as well as people. Everyone had their own brand of it, so many different kinds of breathtaking. I was not only at peace, I was surrounded by joy; my own and others’, the best kind, the shared kind.