Vanished Summer

To be an Icelander is perhaps in sum an endless wait. To wait for spring, wait for summer. Eternal optimism despite frozen ground and mounds of ice that seem rooted deep in the bowels of the earth, so firmly that the thought of living things in the ice-capped farmyard seems far-fetched, a daydream of the romantic sort, a flight of fancy.

For those who wait pining with summer-thirst, who hoping against hope scan land and sea for early signs of life in blasted fields and quiet woods, in silenced summer, who seek evidence of life, of a summer that seems determined not to come – when summer does come it comes so softly that it almost slips past, like a fragrance of summer in the offing, gone in the time it takes to pluck and chew a blade of grass, distractedly, in the dwindling hope of one who seeks and waits upon silent signs of warmth and life.

Summer’s arrival, instantly gone.

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