The Summer We Won’t Forget
There’s a morning in late August when the light changes its mind. It comes in lower, softer, less certain of itself. The cicadas that owned July go quiet somewhere around dusk instead of midnight. You notice it before you can name it. A season, packing its bags.
We spent this one the way people are supposed to spend summers, which is to say: imperfectly, generously, and mostly outdoors.
The Summer That Was
There were surfboards and docks. There were lines cast at dawn before anyone else in the house was awake, and the particular patience of waiting for something that may never bite. There were golf carts and bad shots forgiven, rounds that started competitive and ended as excuses to tell jokes for four hours. There were backyard dinners that ran long past the point anyone meant them to. Someone kept refilling glasses. Someone else kept saying “just five more minutes” about the burgers in the grill. Somebody’s garden produced more tomatoes than any household could reasonably eat, and everyone pretended that was a problem.
The house was full of grandchildren, all summer. A niece learned to swim. A nephew struck out four times at a Little League game and came home more thrilled than if he’d hit a home run, because the whole team had gone for ice cream after. Somebody’s father, well into his eighties, sat on a porch every evening with a book he was in no hurry to finish, which might be the most enviable image of the summer.
And somewhere in all of it, not the point of the trip, just part of it, a camera came out. Not for every moment. Just the ones that asked for it: the light doing something unrepeatable over water, a kid mid-laugh, a grandmother’s hands shelling peanuts.
Photography, this summer, was one hobby among the rest of them, no more essential than the fishing rod or the nine iron, just another way of paying attention. That’s the thing about summer, maybe. It isn’t really about the activities. It’s about who you did them with, and how little you thought about time while you were doing them.
The Season Turns
Now the season is turning, and there’s something to be said for that too. Fall and winter travel has its own gravity, a kind of clarity that summer, for all its ease, doesn’t quite offer. The light gets more honest. The crowds thin. Places that felt impossible to see clearly in July, the Maramureș villages of Romania in October, the maple-lit temples of Kyoto in early November, the quiet cobblestones of Old Havana without the heat pressing down, open up differently in cooler air. Charleston in autumn moves at half the pace. New York’s streets in September feel like they belong to you again. Rajasthan comes alive in the cool of January, Kerala in the soft light of February, and Morocco’s Atlas foothills turn gold just as the desert nights grow crisp.
None of this is a replacement for summer. It’s a continuation of the same instinct, the one that got you to the lake, the golf course, the porch with your father, just pointed somewhere new.
If part of you is already looking toward 2027, wondering where the next season’s memories might be made, that’s worth paying attention to. There’s no rush to decide. But the calendar is starting to fill, and the best trips tend to begin as nothing more than a quiet thought in late August.
From everyone at Team PWA: we hope you had a wonderful summer.
May all who come as guests… leave as friends®
