First, I live where it isn’t long enough. I am a Summer Person. It’s my favorite season. I like it hot. I love summer sports. I don’t mind sweating as long as there’s water or cold lemonade around. Or cold beer.
I grew up in southern California, and I liked it, although I can certainly appreciate other seasons. But I could appreciate them more if I got enough summer, and I never do!
For one thing, summer should last from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I think this should be a rule. No school (except summer school, for slackers). Pools open. Unfortunately I live in Denver. The first few years I lived here, the school board decreed that school should last well into June, and for some reason this meant that the public pools could not open until school was out, so they didn’t. Nowadays, school’s over at the end of May but starts up in the middle of August, and so the pools close early in August. (The public ones. Country clubs and other private pools stay open. Lotta good that does me.)
The next thing is that the weather should be consistently hot through August. Again, Denver strikes out. July is usually hot. July is the only month when I’m confident enough to take my only coat to the cleaners. (It’s leather, with a zip-in down lining, rated by Eddie Bauer for 10ºF to 50ºF.) The air should not start to Smell Like Fall in the last week of July. Something should be done. Hey—weather gods!! Pay attention!
I want a nice long summer, so I can appreciate the crisp days of fall. I guess I need to move.
And furthermore: Stores should carry swimsuits, shorts, and tank tops until the end of summer. I need a new swimsuit. And . . . what the hell, why are women’s swimsuits so hard to buy? I have bought suits for my sons and suits for my husband, and they always fit. When I buy one I have to try it on. Correction: I have to try about fifty on.
(And as an even further digression: men and boys, who are allowed to be hairy anywhere, get to wear long baggy swimwear. Women, who can be hairy only if they’re defiant, get stuck with styles that demand they shave places that are really difficult to shave. Whose dumb idea was that?)
Tennis skirts and dresses should have pockets! Why make summer harder? Yes, I know the shorts that are worn under skirts now have pockets. I know they are “shorts” and not really “underwear” but face it, they look like underwear. They look so like underwear that I bought a special pair of white biking shorts to wear underneath my tennis outfit, on top of my so-called shorts, when riding my bike to the courts, because my skirt always blows up and it looks like my underwear is showing. I remove the bike shorts when I get to the court, but of course I don’t want to hike up my skirt and dig around in my underwear or what appears to be my underwear for my second ball (in the extremely unlikely event that my first serve does not go in). Put the damn pockets in the damn skirt, okay? Maybe some women think it makes them look hippy to have a couple of tennis balls in their pocket. In properly cut tennis dresses this is not a problem, and tennis dresses used to have pockets.
(Oh, and it’s not that I’m overly modest either. I used to take off my clothes in front of people, both for money and just as a sort of hobby.)
Okay, and does the air conditioning really need to be set on “stun”?
Other than that, summer rocks. When I think about it, there’s way more that’s wrong with winter.
But still. Summertime. Those lazy hazy crazy days. I may be an old bat, but isn’t there some rule that the living is supposed to be easy?