Gratitude Friday 07 12 24 Summer

I am grateful to live at a latitude in which I experience all the seasons. As life has progressed, I have grown to appreciate the rhythm of the seasons as part of the passage of time. Each season has some aspects I cherish and often others not so much. I am not alone here. At any given time of the year, bring up the weather and you can hear people asserting it is too hot, too cold, too rainy, too humid or too windy. While I am not a big fan of humidity, there is something about a lazy summer afternoon, a swim in a lake and the smell of wet concrete after a thunderstorm that brings home the joy of summertime. Just being here is an absolute miracle for a myriad of reasons. Some summer quotes I found for this week:

“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.” ― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing - A simple chime, that served to time, The rhythm of your rowing - Whose echoes live in memory yet, Though envious years would say 'forget.” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” ― Henry James

“Most people liked it best in the early spring, when the woods down to the river seemed to shift almost before one’s eyes from snowdrop white to daffodil yellow to the shimmer of bluebells—when the rooks cawed furiously in the beeches, the garden woke to life in a splurge of rhododendrons, and the young lambs caught their heads five times a day in the fencing down the drive. I shall always remember it with the profoundest gratitude, though, as it was that May, that last May, in the last of my old summers.” ― Jan Morris, Conundrum

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.” ― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Summer's lease hath all too short a date.” ― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.” ― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“...This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past

lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar...” ― Margaret Atwood, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965-95

“Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.”

― Truman Capote, Summer Crossing

“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.” ― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

“It was August. The cicadas swarmed overhead, iridescent wings beating the air as they flew above the landscape, breathing fresh air for the first time in seventeen years. Each summer brought a new brood, erupting forth from the earth, like corpses rising on judgment day, a reminder of the never-ending cycle of life and decay.” ― Jesse Stryker, Ravaged by the Rancher

“June is the beginning of summer, and on the 24th of this month is Midsummer Day. The old legends tell us

that on Midsummer Night the fairies have their dances and revels.”  ― E.L. Grant Watson, What To Look For In Summer

Bring on the joys of summer. We do not know how many we have left. This is our universal truth. Grateful for this one in all of its glory.

What are you grateful for today?