at the time it was only a summer, possibly too hot, certainly too long. there was a tape player on a kitchen windowsill and a bicycle with a slow puncture. you ate the same kind of small lemon biscuit almost every afternoon.

only later did it become a particular year. the bicycle is gone. the tape player is in a box. the lemon biscuit has, you suspect, changed its recipe. what survives is the light at six pm, the long shadow of the line of trees, the feeling that nothing yet required a decision.

you do not visit it. it is not the kind of summer that lets itself be visited. you only know it the way you know the back of your own hand — by accident, when it crosses a different surface.