Romance, the essence of love is often forgotten, overlooked and abandoned due to daily life, routine work, habitual activities, sometimes even as miserable as the match girl who suffers and dies from cold and starvation.

So, let’s take a good care of romance, and a close look at its essence, its basic elements: time, space, and two willing, loving, sentimental hearts.

Romance is when you experience and share with your beloved some good feelings somewhere—a sentence that contains three important factors: time, space, and hearts.  When?

It may be any season: spring, summer, autumn or winter;It may be a special period of time: at dawn or in the morning, at noon or in the afternoon, at dust, in the evening or at night;It may be an impressive moment of a day: misty or windy; sunny or cloudy, rainy or snowy.

Where? You may be chasing each other in the open air or hugging each other in the café room, standing on the top of the mountains or squatting at the foot of a hill, whispering by a lake or sighing on a bridge, meeting in the sunshine or departing under the moonlight, praying a good wish before the candle or making a love promise beside the lantern.

How? Romance is that your body still trembles at the sight of this familiar face;Romance is that your heart still pounds in the retrospect of that romantic trace.

Wuhan is a famous in China thanks to its extreme hot summer. Fire Stove, which is Wuhan’s nick name, is the most fitting description of its summer. The average temperature is 35 degree centigrade in summer, and there is at least one week when temperature is around 40 degree. Strong sunshine holds all people at home. You don’t need to move, just sit quietly, and thousand streams of sweat will wet you up in no minute. When you walk on the asphalt pavement, you will not be surprised that your feet stick.

In the past there was no air-condition, even electric fans were rare. You could see most men walking in the streets just in shorts. After lunch, the whole city was in a tired rest except for cicadas singing their dull noisy songs in the cool trees. Around 5 p.m. the heat’s tide diminished a little. A marvelous show started. Every family moved out their special bamboo bed into the street, sprinkled water on the ground to reduce the heat, and exhibited their dishes on their “beds”. This was the most charming time. People were eating, chatting and telling jokes. And children who tied with their own family’s food would not be disappointed, since they could get different flavors from their neighbors without worry. Amusing times came with midnight’s rain, which made people rush back with their pillows, kids and beds. Sometimes rain came too sudden to move back the beds, and most people just left their bamboo beds in the rain shower and went back to their normal beds at home. In this drowsy time some people carried wrong children back and some children ran into wrong houses.