Goodbye to the summer of our lives
PalmThe summer of my childhood was a time of wide-open spaces and the sun reflecting off the sea. I played with my cousins in the yard behind my godfather's souvenir shop in Cala Millor, which was filled with flowers and from where you could see a trickle of people going to or from the beach. Summer also gave us the opportunity to meet some foreign children, with whom we understood perfectly because we knew how to use a sophisticated system of gestures that, with enthusiasm and goodwill, almost never failed. The official footwear was made of plastic—very fashionable this year—and the mixture of sweat and dirt that got in gave us the characteristic childlike feet of that time of year: half-black, wild from overuse. On the way back from work, a T-shirt was enough for a stroll up and down the street, with the occasional stop in the small square in front of my godfather's shop. If we could, we'd sneak into the store to play a genre we knew perfectly well: we knew where the most pornographic pieces were, because some souvenirs from the era were an ode to macho heterosexual love—I remember a kind of gun with a woman with a man behind it with a very large penis.
The summer eves of my childhood were cool, and a light jacket was never amiss after a certain hour when the sea breeze gave us goosebumps. Sleeping with the windows open was a pleasure.
All of this no longer exists, only idealized in my head. That summer of our lives is dead and will not return. Not only do we endure a temperature that even kills people, but we know that every year it will get worse. Every summer that passes, it is more difficult to go outside, and staying indoors without air conditioning is a suffering. In addition to suffering a heat we've never experienced before, the coming summers hold even more virulent forest fires in store for us, and when they're over, we'll be afraid this time we'll have to suffer extreme weather events. But we'll be lucky, because these summers will be even better than those our grandchildren will experience, if we ever have clean ones.
At this point, some of us are already hoping for better times—starting in October, if we're lucky—to see friends outdoors. Summers aren't for going to the countryside to explore new things with the dogs either, because they're old and some days they even refuse to walk outside.
Nature continues its revenge, no matter what the climate change deniers say, who have gone from being dangerous figures to pathetic figures who act like little children: they cover their eyes to pretend they're not in the same reality as everyone else. It's clear that we deserve revenge and that the innocent will pay for the guilty. We're like a suicide bomber who, despite putting a gun to his head and shooting, thinks he'll be saved in the end. At least when we can't live here anymore, we won't be there.
