Winter is always so slow and heavy. Nothing persists quite like the cold.

Spring is never not hectic. The growing pains and cleaning days are immune to the rain.

Summer doesn’t slow down. The opposite actually. The days are longer, but they are warmer and lighter and kind.

Come summer, the sun will still be out at 8:00pm. We will make sandwiches like the ones our mothers used to make us, gently assembled, generous, more than enough to keep us full. We will pack fresh fruit we hand washed earlier in the day. We will bring a bottle of wine we found but don’t remember buying.

We will drive to that place that we always talk about going to. We will not speed the entire way there because there will be no rush. You will carry the food and I will carry the blanket until we find a spot of grass that’s flat enough to lay on, but sunken in enough to greet us.

“Be here.”

We will eat our food and sip our wine and we will talk about our days, the ones that have not happened yet and the ones that did and changed us forever. We will lay our heads back and stare up at the sky and we will listen to songs that make us feel more hopeful than sad until the food is gone and the wine bottle is empty and the sun has set.

We will cry softly on the drive home because we waited all winter and all spring for this and it is everything we hoped it would be.

We deserve a picnic summer. It is so close.