You can’t force the summer. You can try to, and I always do. I uncover the patio furniture on the first sunny weekend of March, even though I should know that more snow flurries are on the way. I get my first ice cream cone sometime in April, and end up eating it under a rain-pelted umbrella. I head to the beach in late May, when the ocean isn’t ready for guests yet.
You can’t force it; summer arrives whenever it wants to and is often fashionably late. But it does get here eventually. And when it does arrive, it announces itself subtly: you’re in the car with the window rolled down; the sun is setting just behind the trees; you turn on the radio and you hear Joe Castiglione’s deflated balloon call to end a threat: Swing and a pop-up.