Unlike her, and most of the people in my family, I hate summer.
Now don't get me wrong. I love the no school, less work, more play mentality. But if we could just switch those three months off to be during winter I would be a much happier gal. I suffer from what I call the summer blues. Actually, the scientific technical term is SAD. Not sure if they intended the pun when they named this one.
SAD is seasonal affective disorder. Now, I have never been professionally diagnosed. But I did look it up on webMD and that is pretty much the same thing, right?
Anyways, me and the sun are not friends. It hates me and I strongly dislike it. I hate the heat of summer and the forever and endless blue sky. A few clouds would be nice, along with a cold breeze. Give me some gray skies and a downpour of rain and then suddenly my mood lifts, I can't stop smiling and the creative bug hits me with a vengeance from hibernating in those drearily bright summer days.
So you can imagine my surprise this morning while I am laying in bed reading and I hear the loud rumble of thunder. Rolling from my tangled covers I fling open my curtain to see a downpour of gargantuan sized rain drops! And then I did the only thing you can do when summer gives you a surprise like that: I flung open the sliding doors and ran around, spinning in the back yard with my kids until we were all drenched.
Now that I am sitting on the couch, listening to the beautiful and glorious rain outside, I only slightly mind that it is still around 90 degrees outside. (I mean really, rain and heat should be enemies). And I don't even care that my frizzy hair that I spent an hour straightening is back to being a wet, crinkly mess. I am just smiling because today was the first hint that happy weather is just around the corner. Goodbye nights with no blankets because I am too sweaty to even handle it. Goodbye bright skies that make me rush from shaded spot to shaded spot so that my skin doesn't melt off. Goodbye only drinking coffee at 5 am in the morning because it is the only time of day that doesn't feel like a sauna. Hello scarfs, boots, and late nights of writing. Welcome back imagination that the summer blues tried to hide. I have at least a dozen characters speaking in my head (Schizophrenic much?) ready for me to write their story.
Now in the words of Hemingway, time to bleed.
