在夏天要结束时又翻开了 Edwin Way Teale 的 Journey Into Summer，试图挽留最后的夏日气息。

Spring and autumn are constantly changing, active seasons. Summer is more stable, more predictable. We tend to consider it the high point of the year, with spring moving toward it and autumn retreating from it. In summer life is easier, food and warmth more abundant. Babies born then have a lower infant mortality rate than at any other season of the year. When, some years ago, Columbia University psychologists conducted a survey, they found that, other factors being equal, most persons have the highest level of good feeling, the greatest sense of well-being, in the summertime.

To the average person, summer is the friend, winter the enemy. The Twilight of the Gods, in the old Norse legend, came with years that had no summers. Instinctively summer is accepted as the normal condition ofthe earth, winter as the abnormal. Summer is “the way it should be.” It is as though our minds subconsciously returned to some tropical beginning, some summer-filled Garden of Eden.

非常喜欢刚开头这几段关于夏天的排比句。

Summer is vacation time, sweet clover time, swing and see-saw time, watermelon time, swimming and picnic and camping and Fourth-of-July time. This is the season of gardens and flowers, of haying and threshing. Summer is the period when birds have fewer feathers and furbearers have fewer hairs in their pelts. Through it runs the singing of insects, the sweetness of ripened fruit, the perfume of unnumbered blooms. It is a time of lambs and colts, kittens and puppies, a time to grow in. It is fishing time, canoeing time, baseball time. It is, for millions of Americans, “the good old summertime.”

But America has many summers. Its continental span embraces the summer of the shore, the summer of the forest, the summer of the Great Plains, the summer of the mountains. We had chosen our general route to carry us through the greatest variety. We would see the season in vacation spots—along lake shores, on the mountain heights, in the cool north woods. But we would also see it on salt flats and in corn country, amid swamps and in areas where falling rain would be sucked up by the thirsty atmosphere before it reached the ground.

说实在的，我真的非常非常需要这本书（这系列）的 audiobook 版本。还能有比这更完美的四季散步伴侣吗？可别说有声书了，电子书，在全美估计资源最全的 lapl，只有 Journey Into Summer 这一本。纸质书，这五十年来好像也只再版过一次。太离谱了。