Y’all, it is HOT. SRSLY. Those of us on the East Coast of the US this week have been slogging through temperatures in the triple digits. I’ve got a horrible cold but instead of staying home from work, I’ve been going to the office simply because the office has air-conditioning and my apartment does not.
I usually pride myself on being able to beat the heat. I lived for years in the Tidewater region of Virginia, a fetid swamp bottom of unrelenting humidity. I even spent one memorably hellish scorcher of a summer at a college in the tobacco-and-textile flatlands of Danville, Virginia, where we weren’t allowed to play sports until after dark for fear of heat stroke. At no time in either of these places did I have air-conditioning. It was all about box fans, rubbing alcohol and frozen washcloths at bedtime. As a result, I can sleep pretty well in the heat and I almost never use air-conditioning in my apartment. But I do have one lonely window unit in my bedroom.
This week, I am so fucking grateful for that window unit. I had a moment of anticipatory dread when I fired it up on Tuesday. Since it gets so little use, I’m never quite sure if it’ll work when I first turn it on. It would be just my luck if the damn thing had died in February and I didn’t find out until the one night in July that I really need it. Praise Maude, it worked. The rattling and coughing of that window unit coming to life made me happier than all the popsicles, fireworks, beach vacations and backyard cookouts I usually love about summer. It’s the little things, y’know?
So, readers, I want to hear your best, happiest summer story so far this year (or from years past, if you have a good one). What do you love most about summer? Sisters in the Southern Hemisphere, join in from your winter habitat, and please feel free to stoke my envy by telling me how deliciously chilly it is where you live.
Thank you for sharing your air-conditioning moment! It brought back memories of a fantastic summer in Chicago whose joys were unfathomably heightened when a friend dropped off an old window unit and I rediscovered the deliciousness of sleeping in a cool room. THIS summer has been oddly filled with those moments where you just stop a second internally and soak it up. I’d say one would be making limeade popsicles with my daughter from scratch and then discovering that lime aid and gin go together famously followed by a good hour of exclaiming over this discovery and other random but brilliant kitchen discoveries past (though most did not involve gin or other liqueur I must say, lol) with my mother. That was a good end to a really tough day.
Yesterday was the first day temperatures climbed up to 90° where I live, and I have not one word of complaint. I hate the cold and dark and snow of winter (and especially hate the sorry excuse for snowplowing in this region), and I bitch about it from late December through March, so I’ll keep my mouth shut about heat.
Plus, it’s a dry heat.
OK – one small complaint: is there a sunscreen that doesn’t feel and look gross AND doesn’t have a nauseating smell? So far the only I can stomach is Neutrogena.
Summer has always been migraine season for me, so many of my happiest summer memories involve sitting on the floor, my head on the windowsill, hearing the first roll of thunder begin. That always meant relief was on the way.
This year so far: Sunday night, home from a tiring day of errands downtown and way too hot, my partner and I went to Inwood Hill Park (a park at the northern end of Manhattan that contains some of the only original forest in NYC) for a picnic dinner. We had bread, cheese, fruit and beer as the sun set over the Hudson River and a hawk circled in the trees. There was a man playing guitar nearby, and kids were everywhere. It was just mellow and peaceful and good.
When I was seven or eight our central a/c broke, we were way too poor to get it fixed right away so my grandfather brought over a window unit. My parents put it in their bedroom window and my sister and I slept on the floor in their. I remember it being so cold and wonderful and going along perfectly with some book I was reading which was set in some frozen location.
It’s amazing how much sweat one person can produce. Just throwing that out there.
I love sitting on my parents’ porch swing in the summer, sipping a cold drink. Hopefully I’ll be able to get up there this year to enjoy it.
As a girl, I loved visiting my aunt in Millbrook, NY, playing in the green fields, listening to the cicadas, smelling and eating the sugar snap peas, and picking the raspberries (eating half of them, the juice running down my arm). Watching the sun set over rolling hills. Endless time.
Right now I just miss the rain.
I love English summers they are wet and windy with the occasionally sun break and yet people still try and hold barbeques and stand around stoically with umbrellas shivering in their coats while grasping limp hot dogs. It’s a triumph of wishful thinking and I personally miss it terribly in this current heat.
I also miss the fact that I associate real heat with the mediterranean and thus with leisurely lunches, bottles of wine, great fresh food and most of all swimming in the sea.
I can not tell you how much I loathe living in a hot place that doesn’t have a sea to swim in – please don’t try and convince me that Coney Island or the Jersey Shore counts.
Fireflies are my favourite part of an East Coast summer. We don’t have them in Australia and I am as enchanted as a five year old when they appear in my yard.
EA: I can not tell you how much I loathe living in a hot place that doesn’t have a sea to swim in – please don’t try and convince me that Coney Island or the Jersey Shore counts.
Yes! I’m in DC and I feel the same way. You can take your Ocean City and your Virginia Beach and shove ‘em. Grossness. I have given up totally on beach vacations outside Australia. When you’re used to the best, it’s hard to get used to the rest. (No offense, rest of the world’s beaches, I’m sure if I was Swiss and liked to ski, I’d pretty soon stop going to ski resorts outside my home country, too. Mmmm… thinking about snow and ice now).
I love the idea of summer but absolutely despise the weather. It makes me super grumpy. But there are lots of things I love that happen during the summer: the availability of delicious berries and stone fruits, freshwater swimming, hammocks, cold drinks. My favorite place to be in the summer is New England, preferably Maine where I spent time every summer until I was 20.
SkipToMyLou, there is a little Firefly Festival this weekend at a park in Arlington!
@SkipToMyLou: Oooh, really? Which park?
@SarahMC: What’s amazing to me is that when you have a bad cold during the heat wave, your body can produce endless amounts of both sweat AND snot. Truth.
I just got back from the market, where I bought a lot of sweet corn, tomatoes, berries, peaches and plums. Summer produce rocks my world. Every year when summer fruits come into season I get so excited—I feel like I’ve forgotten how amazing they truly are and then I realize it all over again and want to stuff my face with them until fall.
“When you’re used to the best, it’s hard to get used to the rest.”
Hell, when you’ve visited the best (Aus) even Hawaii’s beaches are drab.
Becky – oh great call on the produce, I love summer market fruit and veg.
As a kid, I loved climbing my great-grandma’s cherry trees and eating cherries with my cousins. I didn’t even like cherries, but somehow sitting in the tree made them delicious.
This summer, having just moved to Holland with no air conditioning, I definitely miss my basement back home! It’s not even that hot here, really, but I hate sleeping in a hot room.
My best moment this summer was seeing a neighbor kid (4 or 5 years old, I think) playing soccer by himself in a HUGE orange jersey while doing all the sports announcer patter, right after one of the World Cup games. He was adorable, and I could tell he was having the best afternoon ever.
@emilyanne: That made me laugh out loud-I can picture the scene.
Sweet corn, porch swing, walks in our beautiful parks-yay summer! Also, I love that when I exercise my muscles are already kind of loose and relaxed. I exercise at home and after a good workout I’m dripping and drenched, and it feels great!
Oh, and soft ice cream. Yeah.
Since leaving California, I’ve come to appreciate summers more, since they now follow real winters! In Kansas, I adored the fireflies and epic thunderstorms. We still have thunderstorms here, but they don’t compare to the ones that break out over the open prairie.
Also, total thread jack so feel free to delete but – after eons of looking, I finally got a new job! And it’s not practicing law! I owe the Harpies and the commenters here a thank you. My new job concerns setting up programs to improve the justice system’s response to abuse in a certain vulnerable sector of the population, and to improve victim services. Reading this blog and the comments, following links, and going through your blog roll helped me learn a precise language to talk about issues of privilege and intersectionality. To get this job I had to interview with 7 different people from a variety of agencies, and that language helped me a lot! So thanks, everyone, and happy weekend to you all!
Congrats! ::HUG::
That really makes my day. It sounds like you’re going to be doing some seriously righteous work, and I’m so glad someone of your knowledge, skills and general awesomeness has that job!
Totally off topic but I need to say… how the ^%$!@W$%! did I not find your site until just now?! I want to kick my own ass for it.
More on topic: So far my best summer story is tubing down the Farmington River and topping the afternoon off with chilled sangria on July 5th. Granted, the river was really low, so everyone’s butts look like they sat in blueberries now, but it was awesome nonetheless!
So glad you’re here now!
And yeah, as awesome as tubing is—and it is PLENTY awesome—the ass-river-rock combination when the water is low is no fun. I miss tubing. Not many opportunities in NYC.
So it’s really cold in Sydney at the moment (maybe relatively speaking to sisters in the northern hemispheres) it’s a whole 6 degrees celcius/about 43 degree fahrenheit most mornings, and looking likely to get colder coz there hasn’t been a good snow dump in the snow fields yet.
Summer for me is kinda mixed.
I’ve spent time in the tropics, where “summer” (more accurately termed the dry season) is this time of year. The dragonflies come out about April, the sea is less than 28-30 degrees c/82-86 degrees f. All the night markets are on, and its just so pleasant to spend a lot of time out and about during the day and at night.
But then with the wet season all of the summer fruit that remind of summer are available – mangoes, dragonfruit, pawpaw, starfruit, peaches, nectarines, pineapples, etc.. YUM! They definately help in the wet season, especially when making frozen fruit to eat when the humidity gets up to about 95% relative humidity.
Summer on the eastern seaboard of Australia is also great – mangoes and all that fruit yum! tho the beaches here are also way better than those on the northern reaches of the country (the Australia east coast from about Bundaburg (in QLD) south to about Eden (in NSW)). Though there are some weeks in the middle of summer when the temp hits 38 degrees c or more/100 degrees f plus that I do struggle. Migraines become more pronounced. And I usually find where the furbaby has hidden and share the space (with proper distance so we both can shed heat). Get dvds, set up the computer some distance away and relax with frozen wash cloths, and cool drinks and food.
@Tall – congrats on the new job!
@Tall – that is such a great story & congrats!
@Tall-that’s great news! Enjoy the job!
My best summer memory has to be in Tasmania, Australia. I was staying at this place that had oysters on their beach… A hot summer day, sitting outdoors underneath a big umbrella with wooden picnic benches, a cold local beer with the sweat coming off of it, raw oysters and BBQ mussels cooking in their own juices for lunch, and homemade bread. It was the Best Sunday I ever had.