Roasting
Ugh, the summer has begun here, temps in the 80s-90s and wicked humidity. Our grass I worked so hard on is dying, I am sweaty and grouchy, Piper turns beet-red every time we step outside the door. Neither she nor I does summer very well. She overheats in minutes on the playground, turning sweaty and red and thirsty after one round on the swings, and I get sunburns, exhaustion, and headaches which leave me unable to do much beyond laying around with a cold towel on my head. I've already had six seven of these since April, a couple of them so bad I was throwing up and laying my head on the cool linoleum of the bathroom floor and wishing I'd never been born. My doctor thinks they're the result of allergies making my sinuses crazy (this region is one of the top 10 in the nation for allergy reactants), and I am trying to manage the symptoms with nasal spray and allergy stuff and decongestants. So far, my best remedy seems to be a shitload of ibuprofen and coffee.
I do not like summer, at least not here. There is an ease and a slowness to summers in colder climates; those warm days are so fleeting, so welcome, that you can't help but look forward to them. Lemonade and barbeques and porches and nights filled with sparklers and the twinkling of fireflies were things I grew up taking for granted. Here and in California, summer is something to be gotten through however you can, a grueling endurance test. It is a time for racing from one air-conditioned locale to the next, for getting up and hitting the playground at 8:00 am and getting back indoors by 10:00, because you will pass out on the monkey bars otherwise. It's not much fun.
I do not like the beach or the pool, both because I refuse to wear a bathing suit and because the process of covering myself and the kid head-to-toe in sunscreen every two hours is so arduous I feel it's not worth it. It's really too hot to be outside, even when you're in the water, and the sunburns and headache I am sure to come home with mean I'll be paying for the small amount of fun long after I've sent our swim gear through wash.
I was talking to a friend from Florida about our desire to move to Portland, and she said she could never do it because "It's so cloudy all the time, there's never any sun. I just think it would be so miserable."
I stared at her and held out my arms, exposing their milky-pale undersides. "Are you kidding?" I said. "Have you seen me? All of my ancestors are from places where the mere appearance of a sunbeam was cause for a three-day orgy. 'No sun' is perfect."