Ghost-Summer

'Sometimes, in the depths of winter, I suddenly feel as if it were autumn or spring...'
-taken from 'The Great Shadow' by Mario De Sa-Carneiro

Lying on my bed earlier, drifting into sleep in the new - but still ancient- night. I thought I would sleep, but too nervous of sleeping away the evening and hence wasting the last day of my holiday, I just drifted instead.
A ghost-summer occurred to me, the feeling of a season that is not here. Not really summer, but late spring - very late spring. As I closed my eyes I could smell the air, that electric promise of meadows at night. I remember Jen once said to me that the smell was of France after nightfall. Could see the streets - of some nameless and imagined town - probably a mixture of places; Worcester, Uxbridge, Ickenham, Forres... The days I was imagining were those late-Spring grey days. White skies that drift into dreamy evenings. Perhaps a late sun making everything hazy and unreal and the sound of insects and birds. Telegraph poles crooked against the strange-sky blue, hedges and the rumours that something wonderful is about to happen... but never does. The time of year, for some reason, that I always associate with doom metal bands like Count Raven, Place of Skulls, Electric Wizard, Paul Chain, and Saint Vitus. I could picture myself lying on a bed with the window open to evening birdsong and churchyard afternoons... a cold breeze, too cold, but warm at the same time.
The feel of the ghost summer persists now, as I sit in the kitchen writing this on the laptop, in the last few hours of my week off work, just at the very beginnings of winter.