"Summer is icumen..."

...maybe.

It got really hot yesterday. Well, hot for what I think April should be; low 80s. And it was humid, all of a sudden - dewpoint of 61 F, which is where my lungs start to gripe me a little (it seems to trigger my asthma). And this was the most humid it had been in quite a while. (it was up to a dewpoint of 63 by evening; about 65 is where I start to really hurt because apparently humidity bothers my joints, too).

I first put on the dehumidifier. (This is also partly for my piano, and yes, I NEED to call the tuner and get on his schedule. I am hoping he'll have a day in May after classes end when I could get him out.)

Then I gave up and put the air conditioning on. One of the problems here: because the dehumidifier REALLY is safer on a GFCI plug (and it's a three-prong plug), I have two places where it can go:

 - outside of the bathroom and plugged into the bathroom socket just inside the door
- in the kitchen right next to the dishwasher.

In the kitchen, it's awkward, because it blocks paths to various things. (And also, the kitchen is kind of Water Central - it's where my dishwasher is, and where I boil water, and where the washing machine is, so I expect the humidity in there is higher). But in the hallway outside the bathroom, the hot exhaust from the dehumidifier (it is, essentially, a refrigeration coil, after all) blows on the thermostat and makes it read hotter.

I was worrying last night because the A/C seemed to be struggling but maybe not. Maybe it was just the pent-up heat of the day being slow to reduce, plus the effect of the dehumidifier.

I may have to try moving the dehumidifier to the kitchen.

(I don't like to run the thing on an adaptor plugged into a two-prong socket, like what the living room sockets are - I worry about overloading and fire) and anyway, I prefer having the thing convenient to a sink where I can dump the water when it fills up.

I dunno. I am not ready for temperatures regularly in the 80s (or above). Yes, we're going to get cold again this weekend but I know all too soon it will be hot.

These past few days, though, the mornings have been very nice - cool but not "you need a coat" cool, a fresh breeze, that feeling of 'the world made new' I remember from spring and summer mornings of my childhood.

For some reason, I remember that feeling more from childhood than any other time. The childhood summer days - especially the few years I took part in a day camp - remind me of that - riding over with my mom early in the day (it must have been shortly before 8 am? I think?) and it was cool out even if the day was going to be warm, and there was a cool breeze, and it did seem like everything was fresh and clean. (And also, oddly, I remembered the family trip to The Everglades one morning this week - maybe it was the peach-and-gold sunrise? At any rate, I remember the couple of days there, how we'd get up early and drive over to the Vistor's Center and be the only ones there for a while - and I was able to look through the big mounted binoculars at the water birds to my heart's content with no one else asking me for a turn.)

I also remember the couple of years when my mom's friend Marian volunteered to pick strawberries for our church's fundraiser "strawberry festival" (even though Marian belonged to a different church) and I went with her to help, and just how nice and fun that was, going out early in the morning with someone I knew - well, almost all my life; I stayed with her family as a five-year-old when my brother was being born. In some ways she was like a second mother to me, it was that comfortable. And it was the same kind of cool, breezy, clear-but-not-yet-painfully-bright-light day, and it was just nice to get in the car and bounce along down country roads looking at the scenery and talking.

But I miss summer days like that. Here (and also, to a lesser extent, in Illinois) it seems just to get hot and stay hot: many nights here we don't dip below 80 and the world still seems sticky and overheated from the day before when I venture out in the morning.

It's entirely possible part of this is the treachery of memory, and I am only recalling the relatively-few really lovely days, or it's also possible that my attitudes color things, and even though I was in many ways an anxious child, I didn't have the SAME anxieties as I do as an adult, and I was not bearing the full yoke of responsibility for a job, or my own health and well-being, and I was largely unaware of geopolitics. (And yes, it's possible my memories are somewhat Edenic because I didn't know or understand as a child what I do as an adult, though I am SURE there were things in my childhood that made me sad or that I hated).

Childhood summers had the other feature of no school. And nothing planned, nothing I HAD to do. Oh, I took part in day camp for a few years - but that was largely because my best-friend-at-the-time was taking part and it gave us a chance to hang out together (and my parents were sold on it because Sports. I was a very unathletic child and I think they kept wanting to push me into sports in the hope there was one I was good at. Narrator voice: "There wasn't a sport she was good at."). And I did the library book club, which I've talked about before, but the library was such a part of our lives that reading books over the summer, well.....not reading over the summer would have been unthinkable to me.

And yes, I'm still thinking about Diane's "I try not to work during the summer" comment, and trying to see if I could apply it to my life - I mean, really: I am not getting paid for the summer. And while there are things I could/should be doing....maybe I don't need to push quite as hard? I don't know.