Letters to the Editor
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my wife had many of the same issues
but a serious breast reduction and discrete tummy tuck took care of the clothing issues that seem to torture our author. Wife (and subsequently) I are happier for it..
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It's where you live - an apartment in the summer heat of NYC !
As a grateful homeowner with a front yard, back yard, and deck to maintain with flowers, trees, shrubs, there is no time to complain about summer.
The yard demands mowing every week.
1 hr in back, 15 min in front.
Every 2 weeks, the weed eater is put into use. It is a great invention. Edging a walk path, removing errant grass with a fast zap and buzz, gives a feeling of accomplishment. Learning how to rewind new nylon cord into the weed eater was an act of liberation.
Summer heat demands disciplined watering on the alternate days that we are allowed to water - else plants like the ROYAL BURGUNDY BARBERRY will fry, curl at the edge of leaves, become grey looking, shrivel and go crisp.
Petunias, Clematis Romantica, hanging baskets all need a drink to be kept happy. If they are happy, they look happy, and I am happy to have their sweet charm.
I hand water the delicate plants...turn the rotating sprinkler onto the lawns, shifting the sprinklers as necessary to cover needed spots.
Summer is when 14 tree branches were cut down to avoid risk of damage to vehicles in case they break from the weight of snow when November comes.
With all the plant growth in summer, blackberry bushes and hedges have to be trimmed with my fanstastic FISKARS lopper.
After trimming it means loading the car with the yard waste (bring the seats down and line the cargo bed with an old shower curtain)and taking the yard waste to the friendly midtown dump ( open 364 days from 7am - 7pm ) where a car load of yard waste costs $4 to dump.
Summer is when my lavateria plants, 10 in all, generously and gloriously present their pink flowers on long thin branches which wave and sway in summer breeze. Lavateria is a cheap and fast way to add ornamentation to a yard.
Summer is when free concerts are given in the harborfront park 3 minutes away. People sit on blankets or bring their own chairs.
Summer is open toed shoes, as opposed to boots. Summer is walking on the beach.
I have experienced the heat and grime of NYC in summer. I found it hot, humid, unpleasant.
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Thanks for writing that.
You said what I've always felt. Summer is vastly overrated, especially for an introvert like me. For me, the trick is not going to things that I don't enjoy (but consequently, spending way more time by myself than I would like).
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Oh what beautiful weather!
They exclaim during any bout of sunshine. I look back either through the itchy eyes (with plugged sinuses) of hay fever or the slightly less discomforting antihistamine haze.
Beautiful weather? Yeah, right.
Give me the bracing mornings and reflective changes of autumn. Or consider the soothing rains of winter and spring, refreshing the land.
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Use the money
... you got to write this essay and buy an air conditioner for your apartment.
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Summer is what I live for
I live in the Midwest with it's brutally cold winters and summers. I hate the cold because everything is an ordeal. Going outside to get the newspaper or take out the trash is an ordeal. You have to put on snow boots and coat and hat and gloves for a 30 second trek. My fingers turn white from the lack of circulation. I sit on the couch in my cave of an old house not wanting to get up because I'll be cold if I do. I open up the cupboard and my coffee cups are cold to the touch because of the radiating cold coming through the walls. In the summer, I am able to just be. I don't mind the sweating, the stickiness, the flies, and mosquitoes. I am relieved to not be miserable for the first time in months.
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Hell, I've always loved summer, even as an introvert...
When you are a kid, what other season gives you an excuse to get outside _and_ read books (thereby spiking any family's complaint that all you do is sit around and read instead of going outside)? Or eat as much Italian ice/slush as you want simply because it's hot. Or have an excuse to play by yourself because all your friends are at camp or away? And even as an adult, the above benefits can still apply. :)
I do agree with Shukert that "the constant burden of forced merriment -- the sense that you should be out somewhere, anywhere, taking advantage of it all," can seriously take the fun out of holidays. Expecting holidays to be even a little like the non-stop fun you see in media is a real curse. But, hey, 1) those folks you envy are never having as much fun as you think they are; 2)in real life, it's too freaking expensive to do even a quarter of what a Carnival Cruise commercial shows you; 3) fun is relative to the person. If a happy summer for you is about sitting inside and chilling, well, that's your idea of summer pleasure.
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Go jump in the lake
Back when I was in the corporate world, came a time each year that the location and theme of the company summer picnic would be proposed and debated. It was always my suggestion that we rent a nice air-conditioned theatre and arrange a double feature for all the employees. We could spread out cloths and picnic gear in the lobby at intermission. Who wouldn't be happy with that, right? Seemed reasonable to me, anyway. In fact, seemed downright humane, considering August in Maryland but I could never get the votes to override the veto.
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Air conditioning is a wonderful thing
My wife (like yourself, delightfully curvaceous) is from often-chilly Oregon, and I'm from fog-shrouded Berkeley; we live in Silicon Valley and consider air conditioning to be an essential in summer. (We also have Maine Coon cats, who agree.) Now that we own our own home, we have central air conditioning; in previous apartments, where we weren't allowed to install them, I had a variety of solutions including mounting one in the fireplace. (Chimneys are designed to pull hot gases upward, right? That and water are what comes out the back of an A/C...) If you don't have a fireplace to abuse, and your landlord won't let you install anything in the window, we also found it effective to put a milk crate onto the dresser below the window, put a cement mixing bucket on that, put a broad Tupperware inside that as a pillar for a small (microwave oven-sized) air conditioner, and shove the back of the air conditioner up against the window screen and drop a breeze-blocking shade down to the top of the air conditioner so the hot air didn't get in. This cooled down a small bedroom very nicely, and running it overnight pretty much filled the cement mixing bucket with water that I had to dump in the morning.
Our current "green" solution is a Margaritaville ice shaver/blender device. While it's designed for cranking out frozen drinks, I find that a few ounces of Splenda-sweetened Torani syrups are good for making a palatable frozen beverage, and melting all that ice with your body heat cools you down nicely. (It's much more effective than ice water because you're melting ice, not just warming cold water; this uses up about three times the calories.) Knock back one or two of those and turning on the air conditioner may not seem quite so urgent.
(For the cats, we got a couple of Chill-a-Bowls, which are double-walled plastic bowls with ice between the walls, and swap them between freezer and kibble tray.)