In mid-July, I heard cicadas for the first time this year. At that moment, last summer suddenly felt as though it had happened a long time ago.
People often say that the older we get, the faster time seems to pass. Living in a quiet rural town, where daily life changes little, would seem to make that feeling even stronger. Yet the opposite has happened to me.
One reason is that I have been traveling alone more often. I am not someone who spends much time reminiscing, but when I look back through the photographs I have taken, I remember all the different places I visited over the past year. The more moments I can recall, the longer the year feels in retrospect.
Another reason is that, since moving to Kumano, I have become much more aware of the changing seasons. In summer, the rice fields turn a vivid green before gradually becoming golden. Once the harvest is over, the fields return to bare earth, and when the red spider lilies bloom, I know that summer has come to an end.
In reality, the lingering heat often lasts through September, and even early October can still bring temperatures above 30°C (86°F). When I lived in the city, I judged the seasons mostly by temperature, so September still felt like summer.
In Kumano, however, it is the landscape that tells me what season it is. The lingering heat feels like an echo of summer rather than summer itself. Although the warm season has grown longer as the climate changes, summer has come to feel shorter since I moved here.
To me, summer lasts for less than two months—from the end of Japan’s rainy season in mid-July until the rice harvest finishes in late August. That brief period alone feels like summer. For one of the four seasons, it is surprisingly short. Since coming to Kumano, summer has become a fleeting season.
I hope to savor this fleeting summer as fully as I can.
