After waking up early and a long drive from the coast of Georgia, I took a nap when I got home. I awoke to the sound of firecrackers pop-pop-popping in my apartment complex. While in England, the sound of firecrackers means the approach of Bonfire Night (and the pedestrian wariness to avoid being the target of bored schoolkids), in the United States, fireworks mean the onset of summer.

Ever since I was a child, summer has been hell. The paleness of my skin meant lobster-rich sunburns, always wearing a t-shirt when swimming, layering on the sunscreen like liquid armor against my sworn enemy, the sun. I was corralled inside between the hours of 11 and 2, when the sun was the most brutal, as all the other kids played in the sun, amazingly getting browner instead of redder.

It wasn’t until recently that I began relishing the season. Delighting in the moon’s relief after sunset, where it’s still somewhat blistering, but the crickets and cicadas emerge to make it more like a fairytale than an oppressive blanket of heat. At the beach this past week, I was lucky enough to watch the full moon arc over the ocean creating large swathes of light on the encroaching tide. After my family had gone to sleep, I crept out on the balcony alone to watch the moonlight dance on the water, the only sound the crash of waves on sand.

This past week I ate tomato, cucumber and onion sandwiches washed down with sweet tea made by my grandmother and got sentimental as she put a fried green tomato on my plate at dinner. We went to Christ Church near Fort Frederica, where I bounded off with my drugstore camera (I forgot my own) to take photographs of the decaying cemetery and the live oaks that never fail to make me lose my breath at their beauty. As I got lost in Southern Gothic thoughts, surrounded by creaky rusted iron gates, tombstones that had long lost their words and vines ensnaring the canopy, I would occasionally come across my mother and grandparents oohing and aahing about the grandness of a graveside angel.

As a child, the 1946 production of “The Yearling” was my favorite film, and ever since, I have held a certain reverence for the South. Today I drove along Highway 17 on my way north, stopping along the way to take a few photographs, at places like the Smallest Church in America (photo not my own):

and driving down sandy roads in Macintosh County that seemed to lead to nowhere in particular. In parts of the drive it was like time had been forgotten as I sped past small sheds at swamps edge and herons creeping along the roadside.

Now and then my thoughts drifted off towards my grandmother and how during the week she had slipped in bits of textile knowledge into the conversation. Along with telling me the secrets to buying the freshest fruit, these snippets of conversation were ripe with knowledge that would never quite be the same if read in a book or newspaper. One afternoon she whisked me into her bedroom and told me all about the intracacies of her needlework that was hanging on its walls, secrets that were held more dear after I had spent the previous few hours reading about the effect of oral tradition on antebellum quilting.

Here in my apartment, the firecrackers have stopped, and there is no seaside to lull me back to sleep. In the morning, I will wake and not find coffee made by my grandfather hours before or hear my grandmother tell me what fruit is fresh in the fridge ready for breakfast. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to wash away a newborn love for summer and its quiet yet heat-stifled beauty, tinged with the kindness of family and the sweetness of strawberries.