All this month, we're celebrating summer music at The Takeaway. Each week, a different musician is sharing his or her favorite songs of summer. Today's guest is Casey Spooner, of the Fischerspooner, a New York-based electronic duo. Spooner's solo album, "Adult Contemporary," is currently available. He's been working with a new group called Husk. You can download their first single, "Werque it Wow" for free here. Spooner has also been co-producing the "Ladies and Gentlemen" video blog series for Imagine Fashion.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.

—Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

The summer has arrived. Our kids have been let out of school. The sun still hangs low in the sky when we leave work. Our heavy sweaters and thick coats have been pushed aside for sleeveless shirts, shorts, and airy dresses. We seek refuge from the heat under the shade of trees in the park, or by the ocean at the beach. The smell of grass permeates the air. The familiar sound of the ice cream truck never seems to be that far away during the day, replaced at night by the songs of crickets.

Summer is all of these things and so much more. We want to know, what sights and sounds mean summer to you? Download the Takeaway iPhone App to send us photographs, video, and audio of the things that signify the summer to you. We'll play the audio on air, and post your videos and photos to our website.

Yesterday, The Takeaway asked you to distill your summer into six words. Lizzy Schmidt, called The Takeaway to say, "Peaches. Women's softball won championships! Woohoo!" Her enthusiastic recap of the summer intrigued us and we called her to hear the rest of the story, which involves horses, softball, and broken bones. (And ends with a trophy.)

Every year, children go back to school and are asked to write essays on what they did over the summer. As Labor Day approaches, we’re doing the same, with a look at the standout stories we covered over the past few months; from the oil gusher to the economy to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the heat wave.

We're asking you: What event defined the summer for you, personally and in the news? Leave your six-word summary in the comments or text TAKE and your summary to 69866!

With summer coming to a symbolic end, we wanted to hear from you as we review the biggest news highlights. We asked you to summarize the summer of 2010 in six words. And we got a lot of clever responses from too short to too hot.

Angela from Oklahoma called to say:

"Way, way, way, way too short."

A listener from Atlanta wrote via text message:

"Hot as a penguin in Africa."

On a day where the temperature hits 95 degrees, the last thing most people want to do is cook dinner. But the summer’s long, takeout gets expensive and there are only so many salads one can eat before boredom sits in. So today, New York Times food writer Melissa Clark brings us a whole host of new, exciting, delicious and EASY summer recipes – leafy green salads not included. The best part? None of them require you to turn on the oven.

Share your favorite cold recipes for a hot day and show us what you've made!  Upload your pictures to our Facebook page.

To most children, summer vacation means sun, fun and a long break from school. But for many parents, each summer brings with it the same difficult question: what to do with the kids? Working parents often grapple with leaving children unattended during the workdays, and childcare can take a toll on the pocketbook. How young is too young for a child to be left home alone?

Each Friday morning this summer, we're asking musicians, artists and music lovers to weigh in on what makes a perfect summer song. Last week we spoke with "Saturday Night Live's" Fred Armisen to get his picks. For him, summer music has to be either really upbeat or slow enough to elicit memories of long hot summers of the past. The Takeaway listeners evidently have strong opinions about the topic, as well. Many have called in or written to us to share their ultimate summer songs.