I ♥ Summer
I love summer with my heart and soul. I love it and yearn for it as only a Northerner can. My skin positively tingles at the prospect of the heat of the sun. It must be my Argentine olive complexion yearning for its dose of Vitamin D and warmth after being cloaked in goose down and fleece for so many months.
We live in a land of extremes here in Minnesota. Our winters are harsh and arid, our summers humid and steamy. Spring and Fall are pitifully short – feeble weaklings who consistently get muscled out by the bullies Winter and Summer.
But the turn of the seasons is so invigorating and lovely. I am consistently awed by the blaze of change . . . that first snow fall that clings to all the branches, coating everything in blurry-edged marshmallow softness . . . or when everything seemingly greens overnight, the leaves and grass pulsing with life, whispering the secrets of nature. My eyes and heart simultaneously ache and sing from the shock of seeing the long forgotten colors, experiencing the shift in paradigm ushered in by the first days of each new season.
There are certain days in the winter where merely leaving the house puts you in the class of a warrior. (Especially if you have a detached garage, or like me, choose to park in the street.) Forty below zero with the wind chill. (Incidentally, I grew up thinking it was the windshield factor, because my mother, a huge weather buff and native Spanish speaker was always going on about the weend cheel factor. Doctor Dash finally set me straight early on in our relationship.) These kinds of frigid temperatures are no child’s play. This is spit and it hits the ground with a crack kind of cold. God forbid your car stall somewhere cold. Eyelashes freezing shut kind of cold. You could die kind of cold.
But like everything in life, it’s all about the gear. If you dress warmly and with adequate layers, you can and should get outside for a spell, pump your fist in the air and scream . . .YAAARRAAARRRRGHHHH . . . FUCK YOU WINTER!!!! Just don’t inhale too quickly after you scream or your alveoli will freeze sending you into a coughing spasm which will force you to scurry back inside, feeling like a fool.
And just think of all the nasty organisms that get the shit frozen out of them and can’t survive here: malaria, dengue, cholera, chagas, leprosy. Our fierce, purifying winter wipes the slate clean, which is a really good thing considering how mosquitos abound in these parts.
Oh, how I hate those little mother fuckers. I hate them, hate them, HATE THEM! Unfortunately the feeling is far from mutual. I’m one of those people whom mosquitos adore. I’m Doctor Dash’s personal mosquito repellent. He just has to stand by me and the mosquitos will literally land on him, take a sniff, pull a distasteful moue, turn up their prodigious proboscises and say, “ahem, no, not when I can have her.” And don’t give me that bullshit that it’s because I’m sweet.
So putting aside those horrid little disease carriers, I still love summer because everyone around here goes NUTS. There are block parties and street festivals and neighborhood carnivals and art fairs and outdoor movies and concerts all over the city. The horizon is filled with more pasty appendages than you can count, the air is filled with the smell of barbeque and the sounds of children’s laughter. People bike and swim and blade, they read books on blankets in the grass and linger in outdoor cafes. You reconnect with people you haven’t seen in months. Pregnant women suddenly have babies in their arms, babies are suddenly toddlers, people have new hairdos, new noses, new boobs . . . everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief, smiles and heads to Target to stock up on sunscreen and OFF.
I ♡ summer.
