Seasonal Ingredients: My Recipe for Summer
Some music sounds like summer. I find that extraordinary.
It got me thinking about my own recipe for summer. Not a recipe in the literal sense, of course, but the curious collection of memories, sensations, stories, music and images that somehow combine to make something feel like summer.
And that led me to Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins.
Why does this song feel like summer to me?
I didn’t have an immediate answer.
So I stopped and wondered.
That question opened a rather wonderful box of things I hadn’t realised were all in there.
What’s in my recipe for summer?
My lived Australian summer has a fairly definite recipe.
Long school holidays. Long evenings. Being outside. Going to the beach. Playing cricket in the park. Heat and the sound of cicadas. Mangoes.
There is also that particular quality of Australian summer light.
Some of these things are memories. Others are sensations. A few are simply part of the texture of growing up here.
Rain has its own recipe for me, too.
Wet weather wasn’t necessarily disappointing. Mum would sometimes turn rainy days into special days, finding things for us to do indoors. My grandmother even had a “wet weather” box for each of her grandchildren.
Perhaps that’s one of the things I find fascinating about seasons.
They aren’t simply weather patterns.
We add our own ingredients.
Family does.
Stories do.
Places do.
Music certainly does.
When summer comes from somewhere else
There is another summer living alongside my Australian one.
This one is grainier.
Blurred around the edges.
It feels almost as though I’m watching little reels playing somewhere in my head rather than remembering something I actually experienced.
American beaches appear in the mix. So does Gidget, along with Grease and the television shows and movies I absorbed without ever thinking of them as ingredients in anything.
Then there is Summer of ’69.
And Echo Beach.
The Nimbin by Jenny Wagner belongs in this strange collection too.
None of these things form a literal memory of one particular summer.
Yet somehow they form a summer.
A summer from elsewhere.
Perhaps that’s what makes this layer so intriguing. It isn’t a false summer. It is a summer assembled from stories, images, sounds and experiences that entered my world through other people’s creations.
Over time, those fragments became part of my own internal landscape.
Why does something sound like summer?
This is the bit that fascinates me.
I can hear a song and somehow know: summer.
Not because someone has told me that it is a summer song.
Not necessarily because of its words.
Sometimes it is simply the sound of it.
Gangajang sounds like summer to me.
Now that I’ve noticed that, I find myself wondering what else I’ve filed away under that heading without ever consciously deciding to put it there.
Perhaps this is part of how we make sense of the world.
We absorb fragments.
Images, sounds, experiences, stories, conversations and sensations all find their way in. Some are consciously noticed. Others seem to slip quietly into storage.
Then, sometime later, a connection appears.
A song plays.
A smell catches us by surprise.
A particular quality of light falls across a room.
Someone says something that unlocks an old association.
Suddenly, pieces that seemed unrelated are sitting beside one another.
I wonder how much of what we know is something we’ve consciously worked out, and how much is something we’ve absorbed, stored and connected somewhere beneath the level of conscious thought.
What happens when we stop and wonder?
For me, the interesting part isn’t necessarily finding the answer.
It’s the stopping.
I could have heard Echo Beach, thought “summer”, and moved on.
Instead, I wondered why.
That tiny pause led somewhere.
Mangoes and cicadas appeared. So did school holidays, cricket in the park and Australian beaches. Then came the grainier images: fictional beaches, Gidget, Grease, television, films and songs.
There was a whole cultural summer I hadn’t realised I’d assembled.
The connections didn’t arrive because I sat down and deliberately constructed them.
They surfaced because I gave myself enough space to notice them.
That kind of wondering can be surprisingly fruitful.
We don’t have to judge the connections that appear. They don’t need to be logical. They don’t even have to lead anywhere useful.
Sometimes a question simply gives our minds enough space to show us what has been quietly connecting in the background.
I’ve explored something similar through music in my resource Music as a Portal: Where Does Your Favourite Song Take You? It offers a way to explore where particular songs take you, including a downloadable Personal Music Portal Map. (I’ve almost finished it, so if you’d like an advance copy, let me know here.)
You don’t have to know why a song takes you somewhere before you begin.
You can start with the noticing.
Then pause.
Then see what surfaces.
My recipe for summer
So perhaps my summer isn’t one thing after all.
Part of it is the bright, sharp-edged Australian summer of heat, cicadas, mangoes, beaches, cricket and long evenings.
Another layer is the grainy summer from elsewhere: fictional beaches, old television shows, films, music and stories that slipped into my imagination and stayed there.
Some ingredients were lived.
Others were imagined.
A few were absorbed so early that I never noticed I was collecting them.
Somehow, they became part of my understanding of summer.
Perhaps that’s why Echo Beach feels strangely familiar.
Not because I’ve been there.
But because somewhere inside the sounds are enough of the ingredients of summer to create a place I recognise.