There’s something about summer that tastes like childhood—like cotton candy melting on your tongue, the sweat-streaked joy of running barefoot through sprinklers, and the thick, humid air clinging to your skin like a second memory. For many of us, childhood summers weren’t just a season—they were a feeling, both golden and haunting. A tangle of joy and ache, laughter and longing.
I remember the beach—sand hot enough to burn the soles of my feet, saltwater drying on my skin in itchy white patches, the ocean stretching out like a secret too big to tell. I also remember woods that felt like wonderlands, where neighborhood kids built forts from fallen branches and told stories that blurred truth and imagination. We played until the fireflies blinked awake, calling us home with their quiet glow.
Sticky fingers from funnel cake. The dizzy spin of the fair ride. The way cotton candy dissolved like a promise in your mouth. These memories live somewhere deep, saturated with sugar and sunburn.
But sweetness, when left too long in the heat, can rot.
For me, childhood was never just sweet. It was sickly sweet. The kind of sweetness that coats the throat until you choke on it. I lived with terror braided into love, fear hidden behind dance videos and neighborhood games. There were good days—so many good days—but even they carried an undertone, like music just slightly out of tune. The ache of knowing something wasn’t right, even if I couldn’t name it yet.
Summers were an escape and a stage. They offered a temporary forgetting, a sunlit performance of normalcy. But fear doesn’t take summers off. It lingers in the shadows of trees, in the sudden hush of a too-quiet room, in the spaces between laughter.
Still, summer taught me how to survive. How to sweat it out, how to keep moving. How to seek the joy that did exist—because it did. I loved those dance videos I made with friends, choreographing moves in the driveway under the unforgiving sun. I loved the way the beach felt like freedom. I loved the neon thrill of fairs, the creak of rides, the way the world seemed so big and full of color under carnival lights.
And I still carry those memories. They are sticky, yes—messy and complicated. But they are mine. They are the evidence that even in a childhood threaded with trauma, joy can take root and grow wild.
As adults, we often look back on childhood as either idyllic or painful. But most of us lived in the in-between. The real summer of childhood was neither perfect nor tragic. It was a paradox: sunshine and shadows. A sweet that stuck to the skin, both comforting and cloying.
Maybe that’s what makes summer memories so powerful. They remind us that beauty and pain often arrive hand in hand. That even in the hardest moments, joy is still possible—and sometimes, all the more precious for it.
Lessons From Nature 