June

June is summer distilled to one bright syllable, named for the Roman goddess Juno, queen of the heavens and protector of women. For much of the twentieth century it conjured pin curls and screen actresses; by the 1980s it had slipped into grandmothers' territory, and then, in a quiet miracle of the 2010s, it came roaring back. Today it hovers in the U.S. 150s, a darling of the vintage revival and a favorite middle name for poets and designers alike. Clean, luminous, and faintly nostalgic, June smells of open windows and mown grass.