We gave disposable cameras to kids to capture summer’s fleeting moments. Here are the results

This summer, The Globe and Mail gave disposable cameras to kids to capture what they love about the season. Here are some of the moments, photographed by William Olsen-Jeong, Quinn, Abby and Nora Reynolds, Videl Riley and Nahla and Massimo Alasaaed Osborne.

This has felt like a terribly grown-up summer.

Wildfire smoke blanketed much of the country and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes. A strangling cost of living left everyone grumbling like a stressed-out version of the adults in Peanuts. War in Europe; dire warnings that the weather is only going to get stranger and scarier as the Earth reacts to what we’ve done to it; everywhere around us, something to fret about.

But there is the most beautiful antidote to all of that. It’s in the way summer feels – still, always – when you’re a kid.

The Globe gave four families across the country old-school disposable cameras and asked the children to take photos of what they love most about summer. The kids could ask their parents to photograph them, as long as the kids set up and directed the shot.

Photo editor Sarah Palmer told the young photographers to choose their captures carefully, because there are no more than 36 exposures on a roll of film – like summer itself, the moments are precious because they’re limited.

What we got back is so joyful and instantly recognizable that it will split your face into an involuntary grin, even as your heart squeezes with deep envy. This is childhood when the days are long and the temperature high.

What’s remarkable is that these glimpses of summer life in Vancouver, Harrowsmith, Ont., Muskoka and St. John’s, N.L., in the summer of 2023 could have been snapshots from the 1970s, or the 1950s, or the 1990s. To be sure, some of that is the retro effect of photos shot on film – but that’s not all or even most of the answer. Really, it’s in the eternal nature of the season of sun when you’re young and it all belongs to you.

It’s there in the deep sense memory that may be tingling even now in your own cells.

Warm grass tickling bare legs. Wild hair. Sun-bronzed skin. Water to spray, or slip into, or surf wildly. Yelling at the top of your lungs just because everything is awesome, including you. Old docks and spiky pines. Trailing your hands in the cool spray off the side of a boat. Being the kings and queens of whatever castle you happen upon. Ice cream and popsicles – so much delicious sugar, dripping off cones, sticks and spoons.

Days that stretch on forever into glowing, golden twilight and late-night darkness you still get to play in. Weeks and months that go on endlessly, too, long enough to form their own epoch between school years. And there isn’t a phone or other electronic screen in sight.

Seeing summer as documented by these kid photographers is to peek through a keyhole to your own past. But it’s also a ticket to a parallel world where everyone knows that what really matters is friends and snacks and adventures, and the time to luxuriate in all of it.

Long live childhood, exactly like this, forever, with at least a tiny glimmer of its magic left over even for us grown-ups.

Long live summer.

See you next year.