As you read this I will be in the positively bustling metropolis of Council Bluffs, Iowa, playing in a bridge tournament with my best friend and all time goodfella, Sir. Did you know we celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary last Sunday?
Doesn’t time fly when you’re having a good time? We’ve naturally have had our ups and downs like any couple, but for the most part time we’ve had a jolly good time, and as Sir so eloquently puts it, he’s never had a wife this long. I feel a trophy is in order. No, not a Trophy Wife, but a Trophy for the Wife.
I’m not here to wax eloquent on the joys of marriage, delightful as it has been. I’m here to go Bah Humbug and an awful lot of expletives deleted on this time of year.
I personally think August should be banned, and I would like to thank God, Allah, Buddha, and every ultra being who graced us with his or her presence for air conditioning. Actually, truth be told I’d quite happily do away with July and a goodly part of September, but as my birthday falls therein, it would be a tiny bit of a self sacrifice, so I will give September a reprieve, just because I’m a self serving bugger at heart.
I know I’ve written about this before, and I do apologize if I’m sawing sawdust, but honestly – when the pioneers went wagoning across the flatlands back in eighteen flumpty flump – did they come across the Great Plains and decide the weather was better than it was from whence they came?
It must have been an awfully rapid decision, Missouri being fraught with massive humidity, huge heat, death-defying cold, snow, ice, hails of toads and veins in your teeth as it is. I think they found the site of a future casino on about May 15, and decided to encamp forever thereafter, building log cabins like crazy.
A couple of months later, naturally, they were a little taken aback at the soup through which they had to slog to get the water from their now entrenched well, and even more horrified when their well water turned to ice not too long after. But, hey, at that point they had en-villaged and what a waste of effort it would have been to move on to climates unknown. I think, actually, that my mother was a villager at heart, as I can now very clearly see her wagging her Irish-bred finger at me, forewarning that “t’ is better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
Good woman, my mother, she who climatically lived in the equivalent of San Diego for most of her life. I would have loved to have been able to bring her up here to see the joys of the four seasons; the first blossoms of spring (and tornadoes), the first breath of summer (and the influx of saunas from the south), the turning leaves of autumn (Fall to you), and that first breathtaking snow fall in winter (and the first ice storm to go slipping and sliding across the countryside). I frankly don’t think her walker was well equipped with snow slides however.
It’s not enough, apparently, to drive sloggingly through slush, snow, and ice in the winter, as it is then necessary in the warmer times of our year to drive sloggingly through orange barrels. I think it would be a thing of beauty and a joy forever if the governor of our fair state, Mr. Nixon, would declare a moratorium on road construction just for one year.
Pour wheat or corn-made vodka over the roads in the cold, thus solving the problem of salt-driven erosion in winter, and triumphantly thus absolving the need to have a whole bunch of burly blokes getting heat stroke in the summer remedying the aftermath of potholes.
The money we could save, I’m telling you. We could put the burly blokes to better use in having them build all sorts of other neat stuff, like a permanent non-crumbling City Hall/Fire Station/Police Station – hair care and tire center for Harrisonville for which I hear the townsfolk are begging.
On the rare late afternoon that we can enjoy the great outdoors on our lovely deck, Sir can be heard muttering under his breath the voice of doom. “Oh my,” I hear him hrumph, “the days are getting shorter.” This, I might add, has been said since exactly the day after the summer solstice, June 22 – or 23 depending on which school you follow. So summer is not only an interminably long and arduous on your sweaty writer for heat and humidity’s sake, but on my very mettle to survive the rest of this intolerable season with Sir’s whining.
I must confess to a tad, a modicum if you will, of hypocrisy here, though.
As of right this minute, it looks like we will have a chance to return, en famille, in the middle of December for 10 days of sheer and utter heaven to the Cayman Islands.
So, yes, I loathe summer with a growing passion, but 10 days of it with an average temperature of 80, in the middle of coats and boots and ice and snow here, and an entire sea or indeed pool into which to fall in there, is all rather lovely.
I guess I am just proof of the pudding really – a woman is never satisfied.
Roll on winter – for many reasons.
