A Pack of Summer

By Rolo B. Cena

I love summer that when it comes, I become so overjoyed.  I always imagine how the sun blends with the cool, blue-green waters of the infinite sea, and how they together caress the vast sand of the asymmetrically carved shoreline.  Without a doubt, it’s the best time of the year.  

I love watching how summer tide rises and rushes to shore.  Usually, it happens in the morning when summer sun rises from the sea, out of the horizon, where the sea meets the sky.  I so love it that it’s become a personal habit hard to break.  

Summer has a lot of freebies to offer:  Parents arrange picnic blanket on the sand with foods and drinks on top, while local kids are climbing up the bent, sea-leaning coconut trees to plunge into the blue-green cool waters, under the prickly heat; adult companies playfully swim on top of their joyful bliss chitchatting with friends and family members.  The shore becomes a vibrant world of its own, a masterpiece even surrealist Picasso’s brush missed to capture.

Across the street, two bougainvillea foliage of several meters apart, that seem to guard centuries-old rustic steely gate, copiously throws its best red of petals like never before while neighbor’s orchids hang rhythmically like young butterflies dancing sweetly in the summer wind.  These are sights so regal that summer could not come and go without one of them unfolding. 

In a nearby park, lovers decorate the thirsty grassy meadows accidentally shaved by dozens of them taking gala seats under white lampposts, shortly beneath the glare of the pale yellow moon.  You’ll see some of them thriving in thickly planted areas for cover against preying eyes of fudgy friends and neighbors, and most importantly, escaping from parents’ scourging, rolling eyeballs as well.

From a distance, powder-gold sun that peeps over the grassy hill slowly breaks the morning air that suddenly the world smells of flowers, bee-honeys, butterfly-nectars, and sweats of summer boys and girls giggling like poppies in the field.

Truly, life is authentically bubblier during summer.  It’s as lovelier as spending it by the sea, or encamping in its inviting pebbly, sandy beaches with an array of fresh fruits, a medley of seafood characters, grilled chicken and pork adobo with matching hanging rice sans diet measures and restrictions - you can’t ask for more.  But these are just entrée; the main course is absolutely the sand, sea, and sun! 

However summer can also be strange: An oriental looking lad, in her pair of summer wears, holding a floral umbrella over her while dipping chest-deep in the waters.  Oh, your spirit could just be laughing out loud.  What a good way to protect your skin, though!

Or, weirder:  A young girl in beige pajamas swimming by the shoreline chaperoned by a male adult swimming with his jacket donned.  It’s literally the old taking care of the young from a risky, treacherous summer waves, under the spikey heat of the sun!  Bizarre indeed but what a childish version of swim-in-the-sea-but-protect-your-skin drama, lolz!

Watching summer in full spectrum every day is such a delight. It relaxes my physical body, inspires my spirit, and wholeheartedly moves me.  It gives me a fresher outlook as it offers a brand new perspective.  

But summer is more than just what the sand, sea and sun could offer.  Some articulates that life begins with summer while still others proclaim that summer is life.  In a time and age where the fast and the furious stubbornly happens so quickly, summer is where newer life springs, newer beginnings blossom:  Sort of a puppy love blooming into first love, a failed old romance rekindled, or, an aborted timeworn plan revived.  It’s some sort of a perfection of thought!

And there you are!  Whatever qualms you have about summer, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserts:  “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink in the wild air” because he just wants you to enjoy being you – the “newer you!”