The Weight of Summer

I remember a Tuesday in July when the heat in the city was so thick you could almost lean against it. I had ducked into a small park near the station, looking for nothing more than a patch of shade. There were two boys there, no older than seven, trying to catch the spray from a broken sprinkler with their cupped hands. They weren’t worried about the time, or the humidity, or the fact that their shirts were soaked through. They were entirely occupied by the simple, cooling physics of water hitting skin. It is a strange thing, how quickly we lose that ability to be fully present in the small mercies of a day. We spend our lives building monuments and planning for the next season, yet we rarely find ourselves as content as a child standing in a puddle, oblivious to the history looming behind them. When did we decide that play was something to be outgrown?

Shirren Lim has captured this exact feeling of suspended time in her photograph titled A Day at the Louvre. It serves as a reminder that even in the shadow of the world’s greatest monuments, the most important things are often the smallest. Does this scene bring you back to a summer you thought you’d forgotten?