Berkeley shivers tonight, wondering, where did summer go? Where are the bare-armed girls turning golden and sultry? Instead, a faux-winter, grey & glinting, takes root &, despite a collective city-wish for a picnic-perfect sky and sun enough to count more shadows than your own, a city sighing for hammocks and kites, winter threatens to stay, linger.

What's a recipe for summer?

Seeking distraction from winter, I go to the library down the street. In aisles rippling with spines, I hunt Cambodia, colonial histories and cultural theories. I cut myself on linguistics. I leaf through tomes on contemporary arts which sends me dreaming in Technicolor and I devour books on another art, the oldest art, culinary art, books which map arcane steps requiring rare ingredients.

But despite the imagined fragrance of herbs or the accounts of foul U.S. intervention in the land of "the mysterious Khmer" (as described by one white American writer), my eyes won't focus. Instead, I wonder when the summer will finally rear its head, a skittish colt that will, surely, figure out how to use its ungainly limbs and stand on its four hooves.

Earlier this week, I held sparklers in my potholdered fist.

That was the closest I got to summer. I held summer in my fist, briefly.

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