Summer

Summer marks a change in the narrator’s habits of vacation: after years spent at home worrying about her children’s travels, she goes alone to the Ionian coast. The trip gives her a temporary freedom from that vigilant maternal role, while the coastal setting—its pinewoods, beaches, and crowded weekend routines—opens the narrative onto Nina and Elena.

Planning and Arrival

In June, feeling unusually well, the narrator decides to take a holiday once she has finished university exams and bureaucratic formalities. She rents a small, inexpensive apartment on the Ionian coast for mid-July through the end of August, although she cannot set out until July 24. Her car is packed mainly with books for preparing the next year’s courses, a reminder that even this departure carries the work she intends to leave behind.

The drive begins in freedom but turns uneasy halfway through, when she stops for gas. She anticipates heat, sleeplessness, loud music, and a disappointing view; instead, the town is pleasant when she arrives at sunset. Giovanni, the caretaker, welcomes her with coffee and carries her bags up to a small penthouse on the fourth floor. Its terrace looks over a jagged rocky coast and open sea. The holiday begins not with a grand change of scene but with the narrator alone in unfamiliar rooms, facing the quiet of an evening by the water.

Solitude and Maternal Vigilance

The terrace brings into focus what makes this summer different. For years, vacations had revolved around the narrator’s two children. Even after they grew old enough to travel with friends, she stayed home waiting for them, imagining dangers ranging from accidents and natural disasters to emotional crises with companions or lovers. She feared being called distracted or absent, and wanted to remain ready for any sudden request for help. At the coast, she recognizes the weight of that pattern and breaks from it: she gets up from the terrace and takes a shower rather than continuing to wait and worry.

This solitude is practical as well as emotional. The narrator has arranged her own lodging and itinerary, and the children do not organize the days. Yet the holiday does not erase her past: summer also recalls childhood vacations and her mother’s teasing, intimate ritual of cracking pinecones and sharing their seeds with the children. The season therefore holds two different inheritances at once—the narrator’s remembered position as a daughter and her more recent habit of watching over her own children.

The Coast and Its Rhythms

The next day, the narrator puts a bathing suit, towels, books, photocopies, and notebooks in her bag, then drives along the coastal road in search of the beach. She parks beside a pinewood and crosses a guardrail to follow a path reddened by fallen needles. Resin evokes childhood summers on beaches that had not yet been overtaken by concrete. The memory is specific and domestic: her mother cracks pine nuts, offers them to the sisters and the narrator, and teases the narrator for waiting timidly.

The route to the sea is not an empty postcard. The pinewood is dense, its wind-bent trunks and tangled roots making the path awkward; lizards dart from patches of sun. Beyond the dunes, eucalyptus trees grow out of the sand, and a wooden walkway passes through reeds and oleanders to a public bath house. The landscape gives the narrator’s holiday its daily geography, linking the sensory memory of childhood to the present act of finding her own place at the shore.

From Quiet Days to a Crowded Beach

Nearly a week passes in good weather, with a light breeze, many empty umbrellas, and a mingling of dialects from around Italy, the local speech, and the languages of foreign visitors. Saturday changes the beach’s scale and texture: coolers, pails, shovels, plastic water wings, floats, and racquets crowd the narrator’s patch of sun and shade. She stops reading and looks for Nina and Elena in the crowd, whose presence has become part of how she passes the time.

She finds them closer to the water. Nina lies on her stomach beside the doll, while Elena repeatedly carries a heavy yellow watering can from the water’s edge to pour water over her mother and cool her. The small repeated game contrasts with the weekend’s bustle: summer is at once the narrator’s interval of self-directed leisure and the setting in which she watches another mother and child together. The holiday’s freedom is thus not an escape from maternal life altogether; it places the narrator outside her own family’s routines while bringing her attention to Nina and Elena’s.