Around this time of year most  people are focused on, and actually completely enamored by the beautiful fall foliage we are graced with here in Asheville, North Carolina.  I don’t take this beauty for granted; I love the vibrant, short-lived hues  on the trees and the omnipresent smell of a thousand bonfires at night, but I can’t help but be saddened a bit by the season.  There is such a thick sense of endings with the Fall.  Everything reaches the peak of its beauty, then just prepares to face the cold.  The plants aren’t thriving; the crops have been harvested.  It seems that the year has lived its life by the time Autumn rolls around.  I’m not diggin’ it…

     Me, I’m a summer girl.  It isn’t just the sundresses, the smell of the ocean in June, the lightning bugs, or the honey that seems to hang in the air.   It’s the life.  It’s the thing that makes people want to pick the guitar on the front porch.  It’s the nature of summer in general.  I can go out barefoot, with no make-up, and my hair half-wet from swimming and look exactly how I should.  Summer just wears well.  It’s so free and happy, where everything radiates natural beauty and evokes energy whether it wants to or not.  It cannot help but be vivacious, and everything around follows.

     Let’s say that if nothing goes awry and we are healthy, that we have about 100 years to live.  That means that at 25, I am just entering the summer of my life.  June is my favorite month, and I am metaphorically living in it right now.  Maybe that’s why I can’t let summer go more than ever this year.  I feel a part of it, almost beckoned by the season to dance in the limelight of my prime….I feel so blessed to be entering the summer of my life.  Spring was nice…everything was green, new, and hopeful.  Seeds were planted…some flowers never bloomed and others grew stronger than ever.  Now it’s time to move towards the summit, though the peak is far ahead of me.  I like where I am, and being so connected with my surroundings is probably what makes me resist Fall this year.  It’s beautiful; it’s just not me.  I live in the summer, and hope it turns out to be all I hoped it would be by the time I give into letting that golden glow overshadow the green.  For some reason, as I write this my mind is taking me to a sultry room, full of steam so alive I can taste it, with a faint scent of honeysuckle in the air.  It the background I can hear Ella Fitzgerald singing, “summertime and the livin’ is easy/fish are jumpin’/and the cotton high…”  This is the room I live in everyday in my mind, just soaking up the atmosphere, letting this stage in my life wrap its arms around and whisper the promises of all it has to offer.  It’s the only voice I hear…the fall leaves can keep rustling, but I hear a summertime voice calling me home.