Summer and I Don’t Get Along

It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do. ~Walter Winchell

“It’s summer. We’d better draw the drapes for three months.”

Everybody seems to say summer is their favorite season, with spring a distant second. Every year on the Solstice I start a mental calendar counting down to the cooler days of fall. Summer is a real bastard for me. Give me November or March before you give me the Faustian heat of July and August.

Now I have to admit, there are a few summery things I eagerly anticipate. Baseball virtually uninterrupted for three months. Fireflies in the evenings. The guy in the ice cream truck who drives around the neighborhood selling lemon pops for two bucks. And…that’s about it. The rest of summer can kiss my un-tanned posterior.

I never realized it growing up how much I generally hated summer (of course, back then I didn’t know about AS and sensory issues, either.) The insane heat and humidity, the amplified volume of public places, seeing my neighbors wearing next to nothing in the pool, the crowds at all our family vacation spots. For an Aspie, all of this is like showing Dracula a cross made of garlic. I think I was the only kid who actually wished she could go back to school for the respite it provided from the heat and from other kids with nothing to do for weeks on end.

One summer trip in particular stands out; a visit to a relative in southern California on the beach. I felt as if I’d been ripped from a Tim Burton film and forced to act in an Adam Sandler comedy. My family were happily tanning, swimming, surfing, throwing footballs to one another…while I sulked, fully clothed in black, under a dark umbrella and waited for night to fall. Other people might have paid thousands of dollars for the same experience. I’d have gladly traded places with those people and taken my vacation somewhere nice and cold with a good historical site or two. You know, the kinds of places tourists and their kids never go.

And of course there’s the other sensory part of summer: the sweat. I like to sweat in controlled environments like the gym or rink. I don’t like perspiration that draws sweat bees or mosquitoes the size of jackrabbits. Having lived in the southern U.S. for over a decade now, I’m still hoping I win the lottery simply so I can move to a sweat-free zone. Finland might not be far enough.

There are probably some ways I could make a truce with summer. As the kind of baseball fan who keeps score at every game I attend, I sorta have to. Night games are best. In fact, I usually enjoy summer evenings not just for the cooler temps, but the fireflies and the possibility for stargazing. I can and do drink plenty of fluids. There’s also the wonderful invention known as sleeveless stretch velvet tunics, which I use to their full advantage.

Just don’t ask me to go swimming at a public location this summer. I’d probably have conniptions, not to mention flashbacks to the movie Caddyshack.

What are your plans for summer? Do you love it or hate it? (And, for my readers in the Southern Hemisphere, how are your winter plans coming along?)

Author’s Note: I will have the results of both Who’s Your Hero? and Caption This! up later this week, I promise. I’ve been getting over a nasty infection.

 

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~ by Howlin' Mad Heather on June 20, 2012.