The Inside Veer - Signs and sounds of summer

Even if the forecast of 100 degrees for this past Tuesday and the rest of the week in the mid-90s wasn’t enough to announce that summer is here, there are plenty of other signs that summer has arrived.

Twice over the weekend I needed to make a quick trip to the grocery store, and both times I found empty parking spaces right up front. That’s something that only happens in the summer, when people would rather park farther away under the shade of a tree.

I was in a hurry, so I grabbed an empty spot, but when I came out, I realized that sometimes a front-row parking spot is a psychological trap. The longer walk across scorching asphalt isn’t pleasant, but it beats the heck out of getting back into a car that’s as hot as a pizza oven and feels even hotter than that after leaving the air-conditioned grocery store.

The sound of lawn mowers at 6 a.m. is another sign. A couple of my neighbors decided to get their yard work done early to beat the morning heat. That’s a perfectly reasonable idea, except that I do a significant chunk of my writing late at night, and the roar of a lawnmower that early in the morning was pretty disappointing. Even more so when it happened again the next day, after another neighbor apparently decided the first one had a pretty good idea.

After holding out as long as I could, I finally turned on my air conditioner last week. I’m rarely home during the hottest part of the day, so walking into the house after the sun has already gone behind the hills and finding that it’s cooler outside than in my living room finally forced me to admit defeat.

Despite that, I’ve always preferred the heat of summer to the cold of winter. Evenings are my favorite time of day anyway, but especially summer evenings that feel like a reward for getting through a hot day.

Considering we’re already more than halfway through June, and school this August starts two weeks earlier than it did last fall, this summer will be shorter even if the thermometer says otherwise.

So I will appreciate every ice-melting moment of it while I can, because it will be icy again way too soon.