If Autumn is, as John Keats claimed, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, then Summer is the season of heatwaves and thinner socks. And perhaps no socks at all on carefree, humid weekends.
Which is why Summer is also the season of adhesive Band-Aid strips plastered all over much-abused feet. The painful season of lesions, blisters, red bumps, and abrasions on your heels, ankles, and toes from too casually worn boat shoes, unbroken-in canvas sneakers, and ill-fitting espadrilles.
And let's not forget that unsightly armpit rash from vigorous over-application of antiperspirant. Nor should we ignore bruised knees from absentmindedly walking into the sharp corner of a charcoal grill when wearing shorts.
Then there's raging sunburn seared across all those parts of your body you never need worry about in colder seasons: the back of the legs, the tops of your ears, the tip of your nose. Woe betide the raccoon caught in headlights who wore sunglasses but no SPF 30.
And Summer is also the season of alarming entomology: the wasp divebombing the picnic table, the wasp harassing the child's ice cream, the wasp ambushing the baseball fan as he drops his hotdog wrapper into the garbage can; the ants that have invaded every nook and cranny of everywhere; a drowned fly found floating in your unfinished gin and tonic. And, of course, the slimy grub with countless legs blithely crawling across the uncomfortably low beach hut ceiling while you're getting changed.
John Keats didn't write an Ode about any of that. Who would? It's not particularly inspiring stuff. He dashed off a few lines about so-called "Lydian airs" on a Summer's evening, I believe, but never reached the lyrical heights he achieved when writing about Autumn. In fact, all poets encounter problems evoking Summer in verse, myself included, as evidenced by this rather depressing blog post.
