Few things are as special as a summer love.
Set against a backdrop of water, sun, and idyllic weather, summer love is the equivalent of a love vacation.
And maybe that’s what makes it so different . . . and so intoxicating.
Because like when we’re on vacation, we leave our worries, our inhibitions, and our routines behind—determined to experience something new, determined to bring our most free-spirited selves to the table. The same recipe that makes a vacation more than a business trip or a trip to grandma’s can also make for love unexpected.
For summer love isn’t about looking for love in all the right places but in all the places you normally wouldn’t look: on the dance floor, in a canoe, on a Ferris wheel or a tent.
Authors who write love stories know that most of the rules fly out the window when writing about summer love, if only because summer love was never supposed to be forever love. No by its very nature, summer love is supposed to last for a few weeks or a few months at most.
Yet, it is not like a relationship gone bad fast.
Instead, it is a love you will always remember fondly, a memory cocktail of soft kisses, sunburn, and fireflies. No less important because it was fleeting. In fact, summer love is maybe more important because, like a moth caught in amber, it is frozen perfect in time, like our first love often is.
Ah oh, that summer love.
May you find it or remember it well.
—Jeanne Devlin