Summer afternoon, the two most beautiful words in the English language, said Henry James—and I agree, but maybe because if I were a morning person, I would spend the early hours getting productive, knowing I would spend the evening getting creative, and the afternoon…

…ah, I’d sit on the windowsill and watch the long hours go by, relishing every whisper of wind, allowing sunshine to give clarity to my thoughts or fire up my daydreams. Either that or I’d give way to the heaviness on my eyelids, surrender to gravity, and fall asleep cradled in a hammock or sprawled on a beach towel or prostrate on the grass.

I don’t know who he is, but Harmon Okinyo is right when he says that in today’s life, “luxury is time and space,” and there is no better way to indulge in this luxury than to spend it in a summer afternoon, preferably outdoors, on the poolside with a book on my lap, on the branch of an old mango tree, in the water waiting for sunset, wading in the shallows, your toes buried in the sandy sea bed or, if the outdoors is out of reach, stretched out on the windowsill, lost in reverie.

Luxury is a state of great comfort and extravagant living, but at a time when life gets faster and more complicated by the minute, a simple life is the lap of luxury, a bed of roses, the land of milk and honey. To me, in my memories, it would be summer afternoons in an open field, steering away from the sharp blades of talahib, crouching down to play with the makahiya that would shrink away from my touch, chasing butterflies and dragonflies, watching lady bugs perch on my thumb, and tying beetles to a string. I had no idea I was driving them away, that within my lifetime, they would be such luxuries I would never have again, at least not in my city.    

Now, my summer afternoons are no longer free, no longer the two-month stretch of interminable time I used to enjoy on my salad days as a student-on-vacation dreaming up a busy, happening future.

But I am in a future yet to unfold as I write now, and summer comes to me this year in the hours I no longer have to steal from my life or relive only in the way sun effects like sun flares mimic summer days in movies like Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s boy-meets-boy tale of an elegant summer in a northern Italy orchard. Many coming-of-age films are set in the summer, so are many films that deal with the fall from innocence. Think The Swimmer (1968), filmmaker Frank Perry’s sunkissed adaptation of John Cheever’s short story of the same title, set in the backyard pools of suburban Connecticut, or Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), a controversial take on the nudity and sensuality involved in the love affair between two working-class kids who found each other in the idylls of a Stockholm summer. There was also Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá Tambien, a road trip through rural Mexico to self-discovery for two teenaged boys and an older, more worldly woman.

This year, I think I can spend summer chasing its ultimate luxury. Yet even here, a few minutes from Manila Bay, here in Intramuros, where I am concluding an 18-year run as an editor, a career spanning 30 summers, if you include my stints before Manila Bulletin, a summer day like today is rife with triggers. No need for reruns of David Lean’s Summertime (1955) or Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) or Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) to be reminded of summer’s long-lost languor. Here, I smell it in the air, in the salty scent of my beachtime memories, in which, I find myself swathed. These memories cling to me like hot air on my skin, released from me like beads of sweat on a sweltering day.

Ah, the luxury of a summer afternoon. I think I can enjoy it now, and I will, for the time being.