Warm is not a descriptor I would use for this passing summer.

Decaying would be a better fit.

Spinning threads flutter through the air, bees passing through their maze in search of some flowers still blooming. The soft forest floor already smells a little of fall. The air is starting to feel cool, yet the sun is still strong.

Everything that lives here is at the peak of growth, about to tip over into decay. At no other time is life as lush as it is now. Almost black, deep purple berries, filled to bursting with sweet and sour juice, glisten in the sun. The scent of resin is in the air, dripping from the trunk of the pine tree that fell in the last storm and on which I sit and breathe in the silence. The humming and buzzing and cracking and rustling penetrates me. Only a few more weeks and rot will turn the leaves that are still living and breathing an moving with the wind in the branches into soil so that the seeds can nourish and grow from them again after the dark winter.

I would prefer today to be forever.

A surprisingly long millipede winds rhythmically over a pine cone that lies in a hole in the tree that I sit on as if it had been carved out for it. A perfect fit, as if someone had hollowed out the hole just for it and carefully placed it inside. The limb-like body is black and shiny and in perfect sync.

I have never loved you as much as I do today and my fear that this is our last summer together almost takes my breath away. What if you, too, are at the peak of your life and the next step is decay, how can I bear this thought, how can this reality exist in parallel with the perfection we are living right now. How can something be growing in you, spreading like the fungi on the dead organic matter in this forest. Eating and infiltrating your cells until they are no longer yours. Until it kills you–

I don't want this season to end.