thewitchlingshelf | 🌸 The Witchling Shelf: The Romance of Summer

"Somewhere, a moth is in love with a candle, and I understand her completely."

Summer arrives like a poem read aloud in a warm room—soft, golden-edged, a little too bright in places, and full of feelings. It’s the season of long glances and longer evenings. Of something almost happening.

💗 What I Love About Summer

🍓 Fruit warm from the sun.
Not washed, not perfect. Just plucked from a punnet or hedge, eaten on the walk home with juice on my hands. Strawberries taste like childhood. Blackberries taste like secrets.

📖 Reading outside until the pages glow.
When the wind turns them for me. When I have to anchor the book with a teacup. When the world hushes, and it's just me, the story, and the sky.

🕯️ Late-night candlelight and quiet music.
There’s something romantic about sitting alone with a candle at 10pm, writing into a journal as though it’s a love letter to the world. The air hums with stillness and possibility.

🌙 Midnight walks when everything is lavender.
That dusky not-quite-dark, not-quite-light. The sound of crickets or foxes. The scent of honeysuckle climbing someone else’s garden gate. Magic lives here.

💌 Letters written on soft paper.
Tucked into books. Left on doorsteps. Folded with care. There’s something about summer that makes me want to say too much, and mean all of it.

Summer is fleeting, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe the romance lives in the way it doesn’t last—the melt of ice cream, the blush of the evening sky, the goodbye at the end of the garden party.

Still, I fall for it every year.

What do you love most about summer? What sets your heart aglow?