As well as the sights there come the quintessential sounds of the season, ‘the high, singsong buzz of wild bees and the sunny gurgle of the water underneath’.

I love the descriptions in this piece of the various flowers that are in bloom, including those of the elder bushes that are like pagodas – perfect for hiding within, a refuge within an already serene place. The delights of summer seem all the more amplified to Jim, the narrator of the story, as he finds himself in the thick of it, off for the afternoon for a picnic with Antonia – his oldest friend from childhood – and ‘the hired girls’ who have come to make their livelihoods in the countryside. In Black Hawk, the town in Nebraska where the story is set, the winters are long and harsh. I get these same feelings of hopping about and living through several experiences in a short space of time while reading this extract from the novel My Antonia by Willa Cather. Though the memories of seasons past come back vividly into my mind during long, light evenings they also appear as another place, a different country almost, that I can watch a video of and reminisce about but never return to, my passport having long expired.

Yet at the same time, such days often have the habit of bringing me back through time to the summer holidays that seemed to last a lifetime when I was younger. I find that I can feel most ‘in the moment’ on a summer’s day when there are no obligations other than to sit back and feel the warmth of the sun on my face, being in the world as it leisurely moves along. Out of the four seasons of the year, it seems to me that summer has a multi-layered quality to it, almost occupying several dimensions of time in anything as small as a single hour.

This week, Lisa Spurgin reads from the novel My Antonia by Willa Cather.

From my antonia