The Young Man and Summer

Once, the Summer fell in love with a young man and, so that she could be with him, she made herself into a woman but in her human form the man wanted nothing to do with her.

“You are too brazen; too wild; too sexual”, he said to her, pushing away the naked nymph.

“But when I was part of the earth, you ate of my fruit and my honey and smelled my flowers and called me beautiful”, she said, feeling hurt by his rejection.

“But that is different”, he explained, averting his gaze, so embarrassed was he by her naked body, “The human body is a different thing to the rest of nature and look, everyone is staring at us”.

The young man pointed to the people round about them who were all properly attired and she noticed that they were all smaning at them or tutting or casting them cold, hateful glances.

“I don’t understand”, said the Summer, “Am I not beautiful and is not beauty a thing to be admired
or adored?”.

“Your face perhaps; your smile”, explained the man to the bemused spirit of nature,
“Your hair; your voice and the radiance in your eyes but the human body is something that we hide away; a source of low humour; of revulsion and shame, unless it is framed and hung in an art gallery, then we call it a nude. Human’s believe that they must concentrate upon things higher and nobler than the flesh; religions preach that God is not in the flesh but in something called the soul”.

“God? What is God?”, asked the Summer, magically making a ripe, red apple grow from her right hand
and taking a bite out of it.

“Ahhh!”, said the man, starting to glow, “God is he that made nature; something above nature; something far, far superior to nature and those that contemplate on him shall have the everlasting spring and summer of heaven; their souls transcending their bodies and the ephemeral, mortal realm”.

“Oh?”, asked the Summer, “And do only humans go to this place called Heaven? Do none of my trees or flowers or birds or my other creatures have a soul?”.

“Well. How could a thing that has no knowledge of God and follows no moral code be deserving of heaven? Would it be fair if a devout, celibate cleric and a pig both went to heaven when one abstains from all worldly pleasures while the other gorges itself upon them?”, replied the man.

Summer thought a while in silence and then, departing the young man said, smiling as brightly as the summer sun, “Well then. You may have your heaven and things that you can appreciate for you will not have me anymore”.

Then, as she blew the man a kiss, he felt the kiss become the biting chill of a winter wind and saw the woman’s face covered by a veil of falling snow and, shivering, he realized that all around him was deep snow and frost and ice; the sky was dark; the trees were all bare, even the bright evergreens were gone and everyone round about him was weeping as if it were the end of everything.

“What has happened to the world?”, asked a priest huddling and shivering beside him.

“Don’t worry father”, said the man, “We still have the rewards of Heaven, surely?”.