June is a liar.

It shows up every year looking like a postcard. Warm but not stupid-hot. Green everywhere. The kind of green that makes you forget what February felt like. The kind of weather that teases blue skies and mild temperatures forever.
And for about three weeks, you almost believe it.

Schools let out. Somebody fires up a grill. A kid somewhere is already bored of summer break and doesn't know yet that forty years from now he'll be paying good money to feel this useless again.
—
Vacations happen in June because June is the one month the calendar hasn't ruined yet. July belongs to the Fourth and the heat index and the argument about whether to go to the lake or visit your wife's cousin in Elizabethtown. August is just July with worse manners. But June? June still has that new-car smell.

You can still get a motel room for under a hundred bucks if you're not too proud about the ice machine being down the hall.
—
Then there are the fireflies.

I don't know who decided to put fireflies in June, but that person understood something about pacing a story. You get the long days, the cookouts, the first real tomatoes. And then, just when the light finally gives up around nine o'clock, the field behind the house starts blinking.

Every single time it feels like something that shouldn't be allowed.
Grown people stop talking. Kids freeze mid-run. Even the dog looks confused. Little cold lights scattered across the dark like somebody dropped a handful of stars into the grass and walked off.
—
We called them lightning bugs. My mom said the Lord put them there so children wouldn't be afraid of the dark.

I don't know about all that. But I know you can't watch a field full of fireflies and stay mad about whatever you were mad about before you looked up.
—
And then there's the blue hole.

Every holler in Appalachia has one. You probably know the spot without me describing it. Creek bends hard around a limestone shelf, pools up deep and cold and that particular shade of green-blue that has no business being that color in Kentucky.

Somebody's uncle almost drowned there in 1987. There's a rope swing with questionable structural integrity. The water is so cold in June it takes your breath away the second you hit it.

Nobody talks about skinny dipping in polite company, but everybody's done it.
—
There's a thing that happens when you slide into water that cold, in the dark, with no clothes on, under a sky still trying to hold onto the last blue light of evening. You stop being whoever you were on the bank. You stop being tired. You stop being old, or worried, or whatever weight you carried down the trail.

You're just a body in cold water, alive as you've ever been.

June lets you do that.

Doesn't last, of course. It never does. Come August you'll be sweating through your shirt at nine in the morning and wondering what you were so happy about.
But for now. June.

Take it.
—
Wayne Knuckles has edited and published newspapers in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia. He currently publishes a free weekly newsletter about Appalachian history, news, food and travel. You can sign up for free at www.thewaynetrain.com.