What Does Summer Look Like?

@isabellaa-c

I see the summer of 2021 as one doused in vibrant color. 

A few weeks ago, my English professor emailed us with a request: Respond describing how we envision the upcoming summer to be. A newspaper had asked him to comment on what he expected from the summer — could it resemble the freedom of the roaring 20s? Could it mirror 1967’s Summer of Love? He was no longer a young person, but we were, so he wrote to the class asking how young people like ourselves imagined a summer after a year cooped up, a summer brimming with vaccinated youth. 

This question got me excited. There was a reporter out there who predicted a cultural change so large it warranted an article in the newspaper. There was a reporter who pictured a summer of women decked in crochet sitting on grassy fields, young people engaging in hedonism and dancing. I can’t say that I expect the summer of 2021 to reach historic heights seen in the summer of hippies or flapper girls, but the idea that it could is enough to help me dream of a summer that is cobalt blue, that sounds like Grouplove’s “Tongue Tied,” that tastes like cherry slurpees. 

I feel like rose-colored glasses have replaced my blue-light ones, the way I hope warm, careless summer days will replace the dreary, isolated days of last summer. After a year of remote learning via Zoom, my attention span has shortened, my motivation has decreased, and even my eyes have gotten lazy. The reporter knows this, the whole world knows this. While young adults of the past decades spent this time meeting new people, making heinous mistakes, and becoming themselves, today’s young adults spent a year regressing, returning home to empty-nested parents, and falling back into the routines they had developed in high school. Instead of spending my twentieth year breaking hearts and learning lessons, I spent the better part of the year isolating myself from others and asking my mom to make me breakfast. 

That is why the reporter asked my professor this question: After spending a year inside, will modern young adults try to make up for it by living out a summer so self-indulgent, it will make cultural history? 

The roaring 20s was an age of women cutting their hair short and sipping bootleg alcohol following World War I. The Summer of Love was a time when young people moved to San Francisco in order to listen to acid rock, engage in casual sex, and try out psychedelics during a time of instability marked by the Vietnam War. These dionysian utopias grew out of a time of strife. The COVID-19 pandemic could be the event that causes another cultural shift. 

Though I know I will have to get a paid job — where is still anyone’s guess — and begin to act like an adult, I cannot see this summer as anything other than one in which my roommates and I will be lounging on towels in our backyard, eating pineapple, and blasting pop music into the night. Even when I concentrate on working a more responsible narrative into my vision so as not to set myself up for disappointment, I imagine myself in a mandated black uniform of a bookstore, my hair up in a ponytail to attempt to stay cool, making friends with my coworkers because I will be able to meet new people for the first time since I was nineteen and my sophomore year ended abruptly. 

Snapshots of the summer appear to me as the gradient of color from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever album cover, the iconic close-up of Kate Hudson in her round glasses from the Almost Famous movie poster, the rainbow fronting Megan Wolitzer’s novel The Interestings. Not just modern fun, but one rooted in past decades. One growing out of a year of pain and reminiscent of significant summers from the past.

By Lindsey Staub

Junior at UC Berkeley, studying English and history. Lover of sweet lattes, sheepdogs, and the color pink.