It's Summer... yay.

I have a birthday coming up this Saturday.  I’ll be fifty-three.  I don’t bother to lie about my age.  I don’t think about it very much.  Come to think of it, I invest a lot of effort into not thinking about it very much.  Kind of like the duck that looks so serene and smooth gliding over the water, while her feet are paddling like mad under the surface.       

 

Sometimes, though, one just can’t avoid the things that make it obvious that one is, shall we say, past one’s prime?  They flash like pop-ups on the screen of denial.  And there’s no patch available to make them go away.

 

For instance, I noticed that I’ve undergone a metamorphosis when it comes to my preference for seasons.  I used to love summer. Long sunny days, warm nights, baseball, picnics, hours spent splashing in the tepid waters of the Wisconsin northwoods, evenings around the campfire, talking (and imbibing) ‘til the wee hours.  Much as summer is touted as the season to lie back, relax and vacate, everything about it screams, “Get out there and enjoy it. NOW!”  I just don’t have the reflexes for that anymore.  By the time I’ve realized it’s summer and I need to get out and have fun, it’s September.

 

And needless to say, sultry nights are no longer my friend.  There are not enough fans in the world to make 70 degrees a comfortable sleeping temperature for me.  Sometimes I keep a window open and a fan blowing on me in the middle of winter.   The closer my bedroom temperature comes to that of a walk-in cooler, the better I sleep.  Even so, for the past few summers, I’ve been able to come to some kind of terms with sleeping temperature by having a fan in the window blowing directly on to the bed all night.   But the husband, who is right beside me on this descent into old fart-hood, is on blood thinners now…so he is always cold.  And the window is on his side of the bed.   Now, his last act every night before climbing between the sheets is to disable my precious, essential stream of cool air.

 

As I lie in bed sweating, steaming and cursing, an image comes to mind of a friend and me cruising up the freeway over the state line for a (not strictly legal) drink, at ten o’clock on an August night.   Eighty miles per hour, top down, wind whipping, northern lights twinkling above.  It was magic.  It was summer.   

 

I don’t do eighty miles per hour anymore.  I’m much more about the  “slow graceful glow of age.” 

 

Autumn.  Autumn seems to suit me very nicely these days.