The acacia blossoms are passing. These fat ivory-colored swaths still hang from the trees like bloated white honeycombs, practically dripping sweetness, which is not lost on the bees. The Carniolan greys are kept very busy around these trees during the week of their fecundity, preparing a light-bodied, apple-juice-colored honey that works well with tea. Just before the acacias burst out we were treated to the grand spectacle of the horse-chestnuts with their towering pyramids of waxy conical blossoms. But both, signs of the sincerity of late spring, are now passing.

Now it’s full-on summer. Nearly hotter than is welcome, or definitely hotter if you are a baby. Adam, a December baby, seems a bit annoyed by all of this. What the hell? he seems to ask us beseechingly from the sweaty interior of his vozicek. It wasn’t like this when I got here…

30 degrees for several days running. The tomato plants wilt between waterings, and the Weed Garden passes through deepening shades of burnt-toast. Take that, you bastards! Blood-red poppies begin to appear, tentatively at first, surrounded by sycophantic hairy green pods that promise support once this summer thing is truly a done deal. We are in the days of hot Mediterranean skies spawning terrible stacked thunderheads. The days beat down with a threat, pink terrace tiles too hot to walk on, and the evenings evolve into a depthless deep-violet front of towering clouds out over Italy, or a sudden darkening of the windows before they shake in awe of the thunderstorm storming out of the hills to the north. The rain is violent and short-lived, leaves the air vibrating with the fight between hot and cool, but hot always wins out within hours.

It’s the time of asparagus, and of strawberries. Tiny apricots suddenly appear in the shops. Where I grew up these things, or wooden facsimiles of them, would be available year-round, but here the season truly is a season, so we eat them in surfeit while we can.

Ice cream is the thing, too. No one can get enough ice cream. Even the pigeons are eating ice cream, and well should they. The central square of Nova Gorica is a baking sheet with contested corridors of shade around the edges, and the pigeons have to hustle to stay out of the heat and out from under the heels of the hordes eating cones or tiny paper cups of apricot, strawberry, hazelnut in the tiny tight balls dispensed at every 100 meters.

The hills have yawned out their vast burden of genetic material that is pollen but that looks like goose down. The blizzards are past, the drifts of featherlike dust dispersing. The fruit tree flowers have faded, withered, and dropped so that we can eat the fruit they promised, and the grape vines and olive trees are stubbled with tiny orbs in pale green that make us think ahead to autumn.

Summer is here. Open the pool, already, city fathers.