It’s summer now, sister mine

The expression “It’s summer now, sister mine” is Birk’s tender, deliberately present-minded refrain to Ronia during their life together in Bear’s Cave. It carries a double meaning: it affirms their chosen sibling bond, and it gives them a way to inhabit the freedom and beauty of summer while both know that winter will bring separation and danger. Its comfort is real, but so is the future it cannot cancel.

Words of kinship and reassurance

Birk’s address, “sister mine,” makes explicit the relationship he has already declared permanent. When Ronia shyly asks whether he still wants to be her brother, he answers that he is her brother “fully and completely and always.” The summer refrain belongs to that assurance: it is not merely a comment on the weather, but a way of speaking to the person whose company gives his life meaning.

The phrase also reveals the difference between the two friends’ ways of facing hardship. Ronia has wondered why Birk seems not to worry about winter; he keeps saying that it is summer, as calmly as if winter might never come. His words set a boundary around their present, protecting their days together from the approaching separation even as he understands that it is coming.

A refuge from the future

Birk eventually explains what lies behind his insistence. He believes Ronia will have to return to Matt’s Fort when winter arrives, while he will remain in Bear’s Cave. He could seek a way back to Borka’s Keep, he says, but that would still leave him without Ronia, and he would not even be allowed to see her. He would rather stay in the cave, although that could mean freezing to death.

He imagines that Ronia might sometimes ski down with bread and salt and bring his wolfskin from Borka’s Keep. Ronia rejects this as an adequate answer: if winter is as severe as the last one, she could not even reach Wolf’s Neck, and Birk could die in the cave. His light, almost teasing appeal to summer therefore sits beside an unmistakable calculation of danger. He does not deny winter; he chooses not to let its anticipated suffering govern every hour before it arrives.

Ronia, in turn, challenges the future he has assigned her. When Birk says she must return to Matt’s Fort, she asks who decided that she would. He replies that he did, even if he has to carry her there himself, and adds that he intends to face the possibility of freezing alone. Their exchange leaves the central conflict unresolved: his protective plan assumes her departure, while her question refuses to treat it as settled.

The season they try to keep

The phrase gains force from the seasonal movement around it. Spring arrives at Matt’s Fort as a joyous shout: snow streams down the cliffs into the river, whose spring song Ronia hears through waking hours and dreams. The thaw releases Matt and his robbers to ride out through Wolf’s Neck, and Ronia, long kept at home, is finally eager to return to the woods she missed. Spring opens the landscape and restores motion; summer gives Ronia and Birk a more private freedom in Bear’s Cave.

Their first clear recognition of that freedom comes with food, warmth, and a bright morning. They know their life in the cave will be hard, yet laugh together and realize that they are “as free as birds.” Ronia calls the cave their kingdom, a place no one can take from them or drive them out of. The refrain belongs to this moment of chosen refuge: it insists on what they possess now, without pretending their circumstances are secure forever.

Later, when the two are quiet in the woods, Birk repeats that it is summer, and Ronia feels the truth of it. She says she will carry the summer in her memory for as long as she lives. The season becomes something more than a span of time: it is a shared experience she can retain when its warmth and freedom are gone. Birk’s phrase thus moves from reassurance spoken in the present toward a memory Ronia consciously prepares to keep.

Making a “big lump of summer”

As the prospect of winter presses closer, Birk says that they have only this summer and that, without Ronia, he does not much care about living. They decide to behave as though summer might last: to draw sweetness from each hour, from dawn through night, and to push painful thoughts away as far as they can. The refrain does not make their predicament disappear; it marks their deliberate way of living inside it.

Ronia gives that effort its most vivid image. She says she is drinking in summer like a wild bee taking honey and gathering it into “a big lump of summer” to live on when it is no longer summer. The image turns the season into an emotional reserve built from shared time. Its sweetness matters precisely because it is temporary, and because both understand that they have only a little time left.

The refrain’s limit arrives with autumn. While waiting for mist to lift, Ronia remembers Noddle-Pete’s warning that the singing of the Unearthly Ones means autumn has come and winter will soon follow. The summer enchantment cannot hold back the turning season; eventually the autumn rains set in. Against that transition, “It’s summer now, sister mine” remains neither a denial of reality nor a promise that the friends will stay together. It is a brief, sustaining declaration of what is true in the present: their kinship, their freedom in the cave, and the summer they are trying to carry forward in memory.