American Summer, Italian Spring

We spent the whole summer outside when we were growing up. My brother and me, picking raspberries from the bushes along the fence near the neighbor's house, back when it was Jack and Vivian who lived there, back when the neighborhood still belonged to me. We'd gather handfuls of berries, bright pink jewels perfect for our morning cereal. Sometimes my mother would make a pie, although she preferred the cherries from the tree in the middle of the back yard, or tart gooseberries, gleaming with tufts of beards that we had to pluck off, one by one, before she could mix the berries with sugar and spoon them, white and speckled in kitchen light, into the rolled out dough. We had rhubarb that grew in long stalks by the outdoor stairs, in shades of burgundy and pink and green. We had a passion for the sour fruits, the pucker of eating a piece of raw rhubarb dressed in sugar, like a token of a summer, before the pie was cooked and the fruit was bubbling and broken in its own juices. Summer is like that, sweet-tart and sweaty and waiting for you to explore it, waiting for bike rides down the nape of the roads, for crawdads in the creeks under old bridges, for daisies that you thread through your hair. We had friends in the neighborhood and we marched with them like an army, we picked dandelions, we sipped sour lemonade, we stood, in the darkness as it settled upon us, looking for bright flickers of fireflies and listening to the cicadas, watching moths on the screen door bare their long paper wings, dusted in porch light and leftover moon.

In Italy the days are turning warmer as springtime comes. How is it happening so quickly? It is beautiful here, the fields soft and murky and filled with yellow flowers. The poppies that flutter like fireflies on the side of the road. Summer is a beating heart, and I can feel it take hold, the hum of it in my footsteps on these walks, on the jogs I take past fields of fennel and newly planted crops. In bed at night I dream of summers past, and the yearning pulls my hair and wraps it around its fingers, freckles my nose with sunburnt light. Sometimes, when we are in bed, I ask you to let me leave -- just for a day or two -- while you are still sleeping so you can't hear this impossible wish, but I say it anyway. Amore, I say, leaning in. I find the words to ask you to let me go so I can feel spring again, taste the start of a summer newly hatched. I get tongue tied. I lose my voice. I don't know how to say the words in Italian, and you, sleeping in fits beside me, do not respond. But here, with springtime and the flowers and how easily one single scent can tickle and stay and linger and lift you home again: a bud rejoicing, the birds who chirp in melodies, the softness on my skin. The heat of the sun that gets under our sleeves and reminds us that the year is changing. That one season leads to the next. I squeeze your hand and kiss you goodnight and ask, in the guise of dreaming, can't we go back? Years and years Amore mio? You can come with me, I promise you so.