While fall is my favourite time of year, summer may be my favourite season. I always look back at summers past as if through a round window, or a fisheye lens– everything just slightly distorted and blurred at the edges.
Some past summers are just flashes through these windows, quick glimpses of kids running through woods, a skinned knee at the water park, and an ice cream truck’s rear-view mirror as I chased it, my little fist full of quarters and dimes.
Phineas and Ferb always said: “There’s 104 days of summer vacation,” and maybe in Danville there were.
I’m not sure how many days of summer we have in Maple Ridge, because I’ve never really bothered to count – especially in the hazy area between July and August, when days and nights blur together to form a string of moments: a patio barbecue, a lazy afternoon at the lake, an early morning walk on the dike.
Maple Ridge has a lot to offer in the summer.
With the end of Grade 12, I’m saying goodbye to many things in my life, but summer feels like a constant. I’m going away to school in New Brunswick, but I’ll be home for summer.
Summer is tents and camp fires and marshmallows and sticky-sweet strawberries. I love Maple Ridge in the summer. Here, the mountains frame all the hot July days. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come home from New Brunswick during the year, but I will see our mountains in summer.
Looming blue bookends of my round-window memories: Golden Ears and, on some of those hot, clean summer days when I knew I was going to get burned no matter how high the number of SPF on my sunscreen, Mount Baker. No, I would not miss a Maple Ridge summer for anything.
Late summer is perhaps my favourite – the strawberry season almost finished, but not quite finished enough to mean that the berry farm won’t let me go out into the field and pick some. Blackberries, my personal favourite, are starting and with the two berries together, at my house, it means that we bake.
In late summer, my fingertips always smell like sweet berries and icing sugar, cinnamon and pie crust. There’s early morning trips to the farmer’s market to entice me out of bed before noon, luring me with the promise of fresh cheese, bread, and colourful crafts.
The end of summer tumbles carelessly into autumn with blackberries still fresh on the tongue and knees still skinned from adventuring.
Some days might still get warm enough to splash around with the hose in the backyard, but none will ever be as achingly hot as the days spent half-submerged at Alouette Lake.
This fall marks a special beginning for me, setting off for the East Coast. The end of summer is always a time for beginnings: a new school year, a fresh crop of pumpkins to explore at the Laity Pumpkin Patch– there’s always something.
Looking back at old summers through that round window, I’ve realized my summers haven’t changed much since I was a kid. I still go to the barn and kiss the soft noses on the horses, I still go the river and let myself get swept away, I still sit on the porch and watch for the Perseid meteors, and at the beginning of summer, I still count the “sleeps” until school will be over and the ice cream truck chases can begin.
Marlowe Evans is a senior student at Thomas Haney and head delegate of the Model UN Delegation who writes about youth issues.