Three Nice Things to Say about Summer

It's no secret that I hate summer. Hate it. It ranks right up there with pus oozing boils and dysentery, as far as I'm concerned. But, unlike both pus oozing boils and dysentery, summer is something that I have to experience annually--and for about four months of each year, at that.

However, in my bid to try to find nice things to say instead of constantly ranting, gnashing my teeth (which isn't easy to do mid-rant, believe me), and waving my fists at the indifferent heavens, I'm going to offer a few observations about the nice things that summer brings--brings to me specifically, mind you.

But first, I want to rant a little bit, just because it soothes my soul.

Kansas has to be one of the least pleasant places in the world to live for an unreasonable portion of the year. Yes, yes, I'm sure there are worse places. Antarctica, for instance, can't be very nice ANY time of the year. The Sahara is also quite unpleasant, I imagine. But those places are uninhabitable by any but the most bizarrely masochistic people. As far as inhabited places go, Kansas has to rank up there among the worst.

Kansas technically has four seasons, but they are unevenly distributed.

Fall, for instance, is all but nonexistent. About mid-October, the weather turns from miserably hot to something else. Usually, we'll get a week of temperatures in the 60s-70s, maybe two weeks if we're lucky. During those two weeks the leaves are expected to change, but that usually happens without much of the pretty orchestration of colors that so many places get. Our leaves are killed quick and, probably, painlessly by the stark contrast in season switchings instead of being allowed to linger. As other leaves' colors shift to the reds and oranges associated with their slow strangulation and eventual demise, our leaves simply transition from green to brown. So, maybe that's nice for the leaves, getting to die quickly. I guess I can put a positive spin on it that way.

Then, possibly by the end of October, it starts to freeze. Thanks to what I have to assume is global warming (though I'm willing to admit it's just a shift into a non-wintery cycle that's lasted about two decades for us now, just because I like to be difficult), our winters are often mild. We still get temperatures below zero Fahrenheit (and it usually happens in December, before winter even begins, which only adds to the frustration of figuring out our seasons), but don't last that long anymore. And we hardly ever get snow to speak of. When we do, it comes and then melts quickly. So, really, winter is more like a series of VERY uncomfortable periods interspersed between periods of MOSTLY uncomfortable weather.

Spring is a little better. Truly, it is the nicest time of the year. But Kansas feels it's necessary to destroy even that. While the weather might be its most pleasant (not factoring in the frequent threats of a tornado, of course), the rest of the nature around here tries to spoil it as best it can. This is where my nice things about summer come into play here in a bit, so I'll save it for now.

Finally, summer is miserable. If Mother Nature were to actually look like the ancient statues of the Mother Goddess (the morbidly obese, big-boobied ladies), then Kansas' weather would be akin to living inside one of her deepest FUPA folds while she enjoys a long steam bath. Our temperatures will hover around 100 for 2-4 months, and the humidity will rarely dip below 50% (it's 55% today, and one of the least humid days we've had since last week). The only breaks we'll get come in the form of thunderstorms, which routinely include straight-line winds over 60 miles an hour, vigorous lightning, and torrential downpours. And tornadoes, of course. There's always a chance for one of those.

This is the reason that I stand firmly behind my ranking of air conditioning as my #2 most important invention of the last 1000 years (#1 being toilet paper).

And now for the nice things that summer brings:

1) No more mowing. With the extreme heat, even the most frequent thunderstorms dry up quickly, and the grass simply can't survive without constant watering (which is an absolute waste of water as far as I'm concerned). We will only have to mow one or two times until the end of August.

2) No more mosquitoes, sort of. With the drying up of all neighboring bodies of water, the population of mosquitoes (which has been near plague levels thanks to a relatively wet spring) will dwindle.

3) No more cotton from our goddamn devil tree. Or from any other cottonwood tree, for that matter. FINALLY, one month after it started, our tree is starting to run out of fluff. I can't adequately express my gratitude to the hot weather for this blessed release.

So there you go, summer, stick my shining kindness right up your ass!