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Man, i do love this time of year— when we’re so deep in it that it feels like summer has always been and always will be, and any other season is an impossible and distant dream.

Perpetually barefoot, slightly sleep deprived, I wake bef ore the alarm to the hiss of the neighbor’s sprinklers and the relentless cooing of a mourning dove camped on the powerlines above. Outside, the air smells like a mix of wet grass and the spicy scent of tomato vines. Inside, it’s hot coffee, sleeping boys, too-ripe fruit on the counter. The sunlight is thin and slanting, but hinting at another bluebird day.

These are days when you get so good at summering that you let it inhabit every aspect of your routine, because by now summer has had time to work on you, to change you. Food begs to be grilled; you’ve long let go of the oven and stove. Salads not only make sense, but bewitch. Hair stays wild and vaguely damp. Favorite cutoff shorts live within reach on a doorknob, waiting for after-hours porch sits or trips to the garden. Skin smells like a lemony blend of bug spray and sunscreen. The twilight dog walk shifts from hurried necessity to a nightly quadrille of meeting, chatting, crossing, continuing on. Popsicles seem reasonable, even required, and meal times are completely up for grabs (bedtime left the building ages ago). And beach time: always. At every opportunity. The water will never be warmer, and there’s sand in absolutely everything, anyway.

When you fully immerse in something, you sink into it so deep that you lose touch with the surface. Immersion lets you travel like a local, or learn a language more efficiently, or bury yourself in a good book to become someone in another place and time. We’ve been wired to sink into things and find satisfaction in that. It offers not just the joy of becoming sweetly familiar, but also a deepening of perspective that allows us to get delightfully lost.

August is a month where it’s easy to start to energetically bail after the frenzy of summer’s arrival and its bustling peak in July. But this month, every story spoke to us like an invitation to go deep, and deeper still: a Mackinac Island cottage’s painstaking reconstruction, an out-of-the-way island escape, a personal quest to tackle 100 miles of a single trail, an homage to the sweetness of summer nights.

All beg us to dive in with joyful spaciousness and to see with eyes that are content with the beauty right here, right now.

When I’m this in love, it’s hard to hold loosely without romancing the past or denying that anything else can ever