The wild blackberries up the street are ripening.
Summer used to be my favorite season.
My kids had weeks of vacation, so there was time to be out in the world together and also time to relax at home. I loved that there was no need to hurry out the door in the morning to make it to school on time. Sure, it could get hot some days, but at night the temperature almost always dropped down to the 50s. We would open the windows in the evening, and the house would cool down. We didn’t have air conditioning; hardly anybody around here did. You didn’t need it, because we all knew to open our windows in the early evening to let the cool breezes blow through. Nighttime temperatures were comfortable. There was no sweating inside.
Summer doesn’t feel the same these days. Part of it might be that my kids are grown. One is working on Catalina Island and has employee housing and access to kayaks on her days off and is enjoying newfound friendships and somehow saving money, too. My younger child is home for a few weeks before returning to university in the fall; I’m grateful for that at least! But we find ourselves together in the house much of the time with less motivation to be out exploring the world together—partly because it is so hot out there.
Yes, it is hot. It is in the low 90s today, which is ghastly, but even worse is that the nighttime lows won’t fall much below 70 for the next few nights. Our historical low nighttime temperature? 59 degrees.
It’s not only the heat, though, that makes summer less joyful these days. It’s my WatchDuty app, a blessed piece of technology that chimes to alert me whenever a fire springs up in my area. It’s extremely helpful to know when there is a fire nearby. But that WatchDuty sound! I am not alone in having a sort of PTSD response when it pops up on my cell phone. The other day while giving a massage, I saw that I had received a WatchDuty notification (of course my phone was on silent, but I saw the message pop up). I immediately paused the treatment, offered a quick apology to my client, and checked that the fire was nowhere near my home. He said that he understood completely and was also relieved that it was nowhere near his, either.
Summer these days is marked by record breaking heat spells and WatchDuty app notifications.
But also, I try to remember all that I love about this season. Summer fruits—cherries and apricots, peaches and nectarines. Berries on berry vines that grow wild (and invasively, but the berries make up for it, a little, in the summer). Little plums on the trees around my home. A community pool that is open most every day, with adult swim at 4:00 pm, and that I can visit with my neighbors and cool off.
Also, I am grateful that I was recently able to have a mini-split system installed in my home, so we finally have air conditioning. It also provides heat in the winter, so I should have a little less work to do as far as carting in wood from the wood pile to keep the woodstove going. I’ll still buy wood, but hopefully the mini-split system will keep the house temperature at a more even, comfortable level. Because the fire in the woodstove would go out every night, which caused the house to cool down to the 50s, which is not my favorite thing to wake up to on a chilly February morning.
I have the mini-split system set to 80 degrees this afternoon, and it is comfortable in the house. I remember last year when the temperature could top out at 102 degrees outside, with a nighttime low of 81. That made it miserable inside, even though we kept the curtains closed and plugged in our mini-swamp cooler, the kind where you pour in water and add ice to the top, open the window a little, and pray that it somehow manages to cool things. It worked okay, if you stayed close to it. No venturing into the kitchen though, and nighttime sleeping was difficult.
It’s our warming planet. I’m grateful for my mini-split system, but I remember not so long ago when nobody around here would have needed one. I remember life before my WatchDuty app. I remember when fire insurance was available for everyone from lots of different companies, and the cost was reasonable and you didn’t have to worry every year if your policy would be renewed or if you could afford the increase.
Summer is not my favorite anymore.
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