Summer has finally descended upon London. The undergraduates have disbanded, so canteen queues are short and only post-grads lounge on the quad. Weekly lab meetings and seminars are often canceled due to key people being out of town. Out the lab window, plane trees toss their heads in warm gusty breezes, the sun shines against hazy lavender-blue and the smell of cut grass recalls a thousand June afternoons back home in Ohio, being stuck in a classroom with only a few interminable days separating me from a seemingly infinite summer vacation. (To a child, three months is like three years.)

It is hard to ignore the pull of June as I sit at my computer, crunching data, or in the air-conditioned chill of the laboratory, pipetting fluids and setting up reactions. The only thing that keeps me sane is that when I finally get home, the twilight seems to linger forever: even long after sunset, all of London is aglow, and the moon shines silver through the trees.