ほたる舞う
こどもの夏に
時 止まる
Fireflies dancing—
in the summer of childhood,
time holds still.
I’ve never really had a “most memorable vacation.”
Not in the way people usually mean.
No airport stamps or beach resorts.
No frozen cocktails or Instagram highlights.
But I do remember the summers.
Long, generous summers.
The kind that stretched like open arms—
June to September—no rush, no schedules, no alarms.
Just time. Pure, uninterrupted time.
It wasn’t a vacation.
It was a season.
And back then, the world was still small.
I remember the smell of cut grass baking under the sun.
The metallic scent of summer rain hitting hot pavement.
I remember sleeping with the window open,
a soft wind breathing through the mosquito net,
the air filled with the dry, peppery scent of elderflower.
And fireflies.
God, the fireflies.
In June, they’d float like little spirits across the garden—
gentle flickers, barely real.
We chased them barefoot,
feet slapping against warm stone and soft dirt,
laughing like there was nothing else in the universe
but this glow, this night,
this light in your cupped hands.
July came with the beer festival.
It was small—local.
Held in a field that was otherwise just cows and clouds.
But for one week, it transformed:
the scent of fried onions, yeast, sweat, and beer foam
hung thick in the air like mist.
Men carried crates, their hands dusty with hops.
Women wore faded tank tops and wide smiles.
I helped out behind the counter—passing bottles, wiping tables.
I didn’t drink yet.
But I remember the cold condensation on glass.
The slick, sticky floor under my shoes.
The way the music thumped through the soles of my feet.
It was messy.
Honest.
Alive.
Most days we just wandered.
Down narrow paths behind the village,
across wheat fields full of crickets,
into the woods where light filtered down like something holy.
We didn’t know much about the world then.
Didn’t need to.
We had the river,
and the way the frogs croaked at dusk.
We had trees with names.
We had bikes that squeaked.
We had freedom disguised as boredom.
But slowly—without anyone really saying it—
those summers began to vanish.
The first signs were subtle:
jobs, responsibilities,
the pressure to “make something of yourself.”
Suddenly, time had a price.
The fireflies still came in June—
but I stopped chasing them.
There was always something else to do.
The beer festival still called for help—
but I had moved to the city.
I had other plans.
And then, one day, I realized:
summer was no longer a season.
It had become a date on the calendar.
An interruption.
A logistics problem.
A time to “get away” rather than be.
The world had grown big.
Too big, maybe.
Sometimes I miss the smallness.
The certainty that everything worth knowing
was within biking distance.
That fireflies would return.
That you could fall asleep to the sound of nothing but wind and insects.
Wabi-sabi lesson:
The beauty of childhood wasn’t in what we did—but in how time held us.
Those long summers weren’t extraordinary.
They were ordinary, deeply.
Unpolished, half-forgotten, full of pause.
Wabi-sabi teaches us that what fades is not lost—
it simply returns in quieter forms.
A scent.
A memory.
A night where the wind smells like June again.
That is enough.
So no, I don’t have a favorite vacation.
But I had those long, sunburnt months
when time felt like a friend,
not a thief.
And sometimes, late at night,
when the window’s open and the air smells like warm dirt—
I remember.
I remember it all.
life 
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