I love the quietude of misty dawn before the sober sun is up... The morning songs of birds awakening in blooming garden sets my soul gently... Aroma flowers with glistering of the dew... Deep full chest breath... Shy sunbeams flickering over the tops of wisdom whispering choir of waving trees... Serenity of mind... The crystal still lagoon reflecting soft lavender sailing clouds...I step in breeze realm, close eyes and fly with them over the miles, time and space... The serenading music fills my heart... Above the skies the joy of the refreshing winds, as our summer, recalls my being by your side and makes me feel the touch of you and gladness of your tranquil vibes. I smile...

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.

To me, summer has always been about potential. This was especially true when I was in high school. Those 3 or so months between 1 school year and the next always meant change. People got taller or wider or smaller. They broke up or came together, lost friends or gained them, had life experiences that you could tell had transformed them even if you didn't know what they were. In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible. As a teenager, I was always hoping to change, to become someone other than who I was. Each summer, I felt I had the chance to do that. All I had to do was wait and see what happened.

...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.

God what an outfield,' he says. 'What a left field.' He looks up at me, and I look down at him. 'This must be heaven,' he says.No. It's Iowa,' I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass small that seems locked in the air like permanent incense; and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoelss Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit.I think you're right, Joe,' I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration.

Early Summer, loveliest season,The world is being colored in.While daylight lasts on the horizon,Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos."Welcome, summer" is what he says.Winter's unimaginable.The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.Summer means the river's shallow,Thirsty horses nose the pools.Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.White bog cotton droops in bloom.Swallows swerve and flicker up.Music starts behind the mountain.There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.The speckled fish jumps; and the strongSwift warrior is up and running.A little, jumpy, chirpy fellowHits the highest note there is;The lark sings out his clear tidings.Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

I have hopein who I am becoming.I have belief in every scar and disgraceful wordI have ever spokenor been toldbecause it is still teaching meand I have hope in who I am becoming.They say it takes 756 days to run to someone you loveand they also say that the only romance worth fighting foris the one with yourselfand I know by nowthat they say a lot of things,people talking everywherewithout saying a word,but if it took me all those years to learn myselfor teach myselfhow to look into the mirrorwithout breaking itI know for a fact that it was a fight worth fighting.I stood up for my own head and so did my heartand we are coming to terms with ourselves.Shaking hands, saying ”let’s make this workfor we have places to goand people to seeand we will need each other”So I have hopein who I am becoming.It’s Julyand I have hope in who I am becoming.

Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the soulish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition—a vague remembrance—of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared.

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

On the edge of dreaming when the brain lets go, when it stops its scheming, our blood runs slow... Then the heart speaks clearly of the things it knows, things it brought so dearly at the evening's glow... And a misty sunset fills the west with yellow, gold and scarlet red. The bowl of space a dawn sheds light upon our silky bed. For you I send refreshing rain to wash the past away. A quiet breeze drifts warmly across your tired face. It brings the scents from flower climbs, and leaves without a trace. With vines and newborn stars in our hair...undressed, bronzed platinum we are as summer in your golden church... Like whispers lost at sea...we soar beyond the sky of fire...in harmony within the clash of elements... Together lost and free to claim our each desire. Like leaves we float to earth, once more...forbidden passion, romantic eyes, and heated lips...two burning amber hearts released and drinking slowly mysterious champagne of heaven sweetest rest...

The sidewalks were haunted by dustghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice onthe lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed avolcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritabledogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-taneous combustion at three in the morning.Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element forelement. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with nosound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serenevapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks werebrass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threatabove the unslept houses. The cicadas sang louder and yet louder. The sun did not rise, it overflowed.

It was a vision of the one thing that we both hoped someday would be...the warmth of our bodies next to each other's, reflected in sunset of our secret place... We longed for it to be like this, each and every evening... Dancing in the night, playing hide-and-seek in the day, the beauty of our souls blossoms... Never before had we felt so happy, never before had we felt so alive... We hear the birds, sensing the cheerful breeze, the rainbow's end does linger here....our tenderness, sighs and spirits speak and we do know clear... This place is where love and laughter meet... You take my hand, kiss each finger tip, with tears in your eyes you touch my cheek and whisper of how wondrous this, we share our love once again. The love that gives us wings to fly anew. Our hearts in sweet pleasing pain beat as one in the rhythm of long forgotten yet melody... Together again at this wondrous place, where just our presence adds more grace and makes it what was meant to be - a place for you a place for me...