Summer

 

 I don’t know when I began to hate summer. When I was a child, I looked forward to it all year. My childhood summers, spent in Ohio, near Lake Erie, were filled with long, hot, humid days, playing in our yard with the neighborhood kids, and going to Headlands Beach. Our evenings were spent hunting fireflies, sleeping with windows open, hoping for a cool breeze. A week at my grandparents, and family vacations to dreamy seaside towns on Cape Cod were something to look forward to. Summers, back then, were made of the stuff that you read about in coming-of-age novels like Thimble Summer.

When I was 12, we moved to Southern California. I don’t think my hatred of summer began then. Our summers simply took on a new rhythm. They were, overall, still the stuff of storybooks. We had a swimming pool in our backyard and spent hours bobbing around in the water and driving the neighbors crazy with countless games of Marco Polo.

My best friend and I would play in her parent’s camper, parked next to her house. We would escape the heat in the cool, dark trailer, playing Dutch Blitz for hours at the little table that folded out and could magically turn into bed for sleepovers later.

My later teen years brought summers of bonfires at the beach with boyfriends and friends, parties in backyards of houses where the parents weren’t home, trips to Disneyland and water parks, and a growing sense of freedom that the teen years and a driver’s license delivered. 

I think my dislike of summer began in my college years. I attended college in Riverside, California. A desert town where blistering temperatures in the 100s were common and I couldn’t afford to run the air conditioning in my apartment. Although it was summer vacation from college studies, I worked full-time, trying to save up enough money to get through the school year when I could only work part-time. For a few years, I commuted over an hour, sitting on the hot freeway, windows rolled down in my Toyota Starlet (also without air conditioning), breathing truck fumes. I would come home too exhausted to have any fun. There were no summer trips those years as I was working and too broke to pay for a trip.

Once I graduated from college, I started my career and summers ran into the rest of the year. There was no demarcation between seasons, no sense of freedom from the school year’s schedule. Summers began to only mean the onslaught of oppressing heat.

Thanks to climate change, summers meant forest fires and the heat became more intense. In my last years living in Southern California, summer began to look like what winter looks like to people in colder climates. It was a time when I was locked in the house, air conditioning blasting, the only place I could find relief from the oppressive heat. To add insult to injury I became less and less physically able to tolerate heat and would feel physically ill if I became too hot. Smoke from raging and uncontrollable forest fires left my asthmatic lungs gasping for oxygen. I counted the days until the rainy season would begin and I could once again take a full, deep breath.

Then, almost six years ago, we moved north, to Washington state. Summers overall were milder and fire season shorter.  Evenings were usually cool enough to need a sweater. But I still carried my hate of summer with me. I had spent over 30 years hating summer. Falling back in love with it was a difficult task.

But this year, this year I seem to be making my way back to summer. Is it that I am finally recovering from the Southern California heat? Or is it that I am older, retired, returning to a time of freedom when there are no responsibilities? No job to go to? No traffic to sit in? No children home from school needing to be entertained and fed?

This summer I wake early, eager to head outside onto the deck to enjoy the coolness of the morning as I drink my morning tea. Lunches are eaten outside. Crafting, gardening, and writing are the only to do items on my list.

As the afternoon warms (but rarely becomes stifling), I move indoors, closing curtains and relaxing into the stupor of a siesta-like state. Dinner is made. Then back outside to enjoy the cooling air. I take a walk around the garden, wish for the fireflies of my youth. I think about how special it was to be able to go outside after supper when I was young. We would play Ghosts in the Graveyard and Red Rover with the neighborhood children. I consider the idea of knocking on my neighbors’ doors to see if they want to come out and play. I am, I think, falling back in love with summer.

How do you feel summer? Do you have any special summer memories to tell me about?