It’s mid-July, midsummer. It’s easy now to believe that summer will always be with us, that the long days and sultry nights will remain. What is it about this season that makes me not just forget about the others but cease to believe in them. Is it just wishful thinking or is there some scientific explanation for this blissful (but oh-so-wrong) perception of endless summer?

Maybe the long twilights that occur around the summer solstice? With that much light in the sky it’s easy to believe it will never end. The gray days of January seem preposterous, a bad dream.

Or maybe proximity to the perihelion, the day the earth is closest to the sun? But no. Because in the northern hemisphere the perihelion typically occurs in January.

Maybe summer seems endless because it seemed that way when I was young, and old habits (and dreams) die hard. Not exactly scientific, but true in that bone deep way of myth and time.