“Summertime, and the living is easy…” – Ira Gershwin
In Phoenix today, the temperature is 111. In Denver, 94; in Madison, 88, and in Raleigh, 90. It’s summer and it’s hot.
Here in beautiful Kenmore, a frolicing burb north of Seattle, it’s 66. We’ve barely reached 70 this year. And it’s raining. And it’s the middle of July. I need heat, damnit! Summer, after all, is that wondrous period that morphs from, “Thank God it’s finally warming up” to “Oh, my God, I can’t take another moment of this!” Humans are notorious for this: bouncing from one extreme to the next within each seasonal period.
But you have to actually get into that period for it to matter and have any significance.
Some of this is the result of our being held incommunicado for a third of the year by Covid-19, and the gossamer government response, however intended, and the deep primal need to get out of the house and into the light. It is the light, that emitting power of the sun to to warm, to bake, to overwhelm that has been missing for those of us up here in the northwest quadrant of the contiguous United States, however ironic that phrase may now sound. And we’ve had enough.
I do not want a cloudy cool summer. I do not. They are dismal and dreary, and of no recuperative value. Even if I do nothing more than move the perimeter of my confinement to the deck and yard, that deck and yard should be flooded with light and heat. I want to one day in the near future whine of the stultifying heat and long for those cool days when the Pacific marine layer settles on top of us like a smothering blanket. I want to long for another rainy day, but if rainy days continue unabated throughout the summer, then what’s the point?
We got rules up here, people!
Now, I’m not asking for 111 degrees, because that’s too hot and the majority of the citizenry would drop dead-and we can’t have that. I’m merely saying that it’s time for that high pressure ridge, that’s been goofing off God knows where, gets its act together and gives us our two months of summer and temperatures in the 80s.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Unless God really is punishing us, in which case we’re doomed.
©2020 David William Pearce
David William Pearce, Writer 