Summer brings with it a certain set of rites and rituals — and everyone’s are personal and unique. For our summer-long ode to the season, T has invited writers to share their own. First up is Salvatore Scibona, who writes about the joys of lying nude on a hot day.

Twenty-five years ago, after a long and dismal winter of leaden skies, the sun came out.

I was at school in Maryland. Barefoot, I left the dorm. The heat was mild and glorious. My classmates, in various states of undress, lay splayed on stone benches, talking softly or napping in clumps like seals while the dirty snow melted around them. I sat on the sun-soaked concrete steps of the dorm, needless of any possessions, resenting no one and nothing except my clothes, which I badly wanted to take off.

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This would become a theme, the desire to be naked in the sun. Maybe there once lived some hopeless person who never had the urge, but it feels as innate and universal as thirst. And once you’ve found your isolated spot or stretch of sanctioned beach and have stripped down, who can deny a sense of common cause not only with the rest of humankind but with the animals? When you sunbathe naked, you are subjecting yourself to the same condition and to the same star as every creature that ever crept or crawled into the daylight without recourse to underpants. The pleasure is both carnal and otherworldly. Nothing civilization has to offer can compete.