Summer Never Ended

I remember when summers had an end. As a child, late August always brought cooler winds, the smell of rain, and a quiet promise that autumn was waiting just around the corner. But last year, it felt like summer never ended.

It started with small things. In June, the air conditioner in our apartment ran all night. My mother complained about the electricity bill, but she didn’t dare switch it off. The nights felt heavy, as if the air itself had forgotten how to move. By July, the park where we used to walk the dog had turned into a field of dust. Grass that once stayed green until September had dried up before the school holidays even began.

At first, I brushed it off. “Just a hotter year,” I told myself. But then things began happening that were impossible to ignore.

One evening, I was driving home from work when the car thermometer read 43 degrees Celsius. My phone buzzed with a weather alert: “Extreme heat, stay indoors.” I laughed bitterly. Stay indoors? People still had to work. Delivery drivers were still riding bikes under the punishing sun, their shirts soaked with sweat. Construction workers were still standing on scaffolding, their helmets trapping heat instead of protecting them. Heat doesn’t ask permission before it presses itself into your bones.

That night, my grandmother called from the countryside. Her voice shook. The river that had always flowed behind her house was nothing more than cracked earth. For decades, that river had been her lifeline—she watered her garden from it, cooled her feet in it, and taught us to fish there when we were little. Now, she said, “It’s gone. I’ve never seen it gone.”

Her words made me realize that this wasn’t just about inconvenience. It was about losing the pieces of life we thought were permanent.

A few weeks later, my friend Lena invited me over. She lives on the fourth floor of an old building with no air conditioning. When I walked in, I was hit by a wave of suffocating heat. She had all her windows open, but it didn’t matter. The air felt trapped. She handed me a glass of water and whispered, “I barely sleep anymore.” Her face was pale, her eyes ringed with exhaustion. Her ten-year-old daughter lay on the couch, fanning herself with a school notebook. It was then I realized how cruel heat can be—it doesn’t just make you sweat, it steals your rest, your patience, your peace of mind.

By August, wildfires started spreading in a region not far from us. Smoke drifted into the city, coating the horizon in a reddish haze. My younger brother, who has asthma, wheezed every time he stepped outside. He stopped playing basketball with his friends because running made his chest feel like it was tightening shut. One afternoon, as I handed him his inhaler, he asked me, “Was it always like this?” I didn’t know what to say.

Climate change had slipped into our daily lives without ceremony, without announcement. It was no longer something I read about in newspapers or saw in distant documentaries. It was the extra zeros on the electricity bill, the sleepless nights, the riverbeds turned to stone, the empty parks where grass no longer grew, and the smoke that stung our eyes on the way to work.

In September, when the heat finally broke with a sudden storm, I stood at my window and watched rain slam against the pavement. It should have felt like relief, but instead it felt violent. Streets flooded within minutes, drains overflowed, and cars stalled in the water. The city wasn’t built for this kind of weather—too dry one month, drowning the next.

That evening, I sat with my grandmother on the phone again. She told me she had planted fewer vegetables this year, afraid they wouldn’t survive the heat. “It feels like the earth is warning us,” she said softly. “But I wonder if we’re listening.”

Her words stayed with me. For the first time, I understood climate change not as a headline but as a neighbor—unwelcome, relentless, and always at the door. I began to notice small changes in myself too. I turned off lights more often, carried a reusable bottle everywhere, chose the bus over driving when I could. Were these small acts enough? Probably not. But they were something.

Because the truth is, climate change isn’t just polar bears and melting ice caps. It’s our grandmother’s dry rivers, our sleepless nights, our children’s lungs choking on smoke. It’s the shape of our lives shifting beneath our feet. And one day, if we don’t change, it will be the story our children tell about us—how we lived in the summer that never ended, and whether we listened to the warnings in time.