Tuesday, April 4

Feels Like Summer For This Morning Coffee Muses

Feels Like Summer For This Morning Coffee Muses

The weather has definitely turned in a summer direction. Yesterday the high in my microclimate of a backyard passed 90 degrees. That figure drives the Weather Underground crazy and they will drop my station off line because it reads three or so degrees warmer than any around me… Funny thing though, I have multiple sensors scattered around and old style thermometers and they all agree within a degree or two of each other.

Speaking of summer, I walked out on this back porch after a warm shower and it set me to reminiscing about the summers of my youth. You know the one’s I’m talking about, pre-AC summers, back then I can remember dreaming of a cool bath. Fill the tub with water as cool as you could stand and soaking until your fingers and your toes turned prunish then pulling a chair in front of the oscillating fan and enjoying a chill on a hot summer’s day…

Most of those summer afternoons were spent at the city pool. We always had a seasons family pass for the pool in our neighborhood. We would walk the most of a mile between our house and the pool, play for a few hours before walking back home. Day by day, week by week, long hot summer days between the end of one school year at the end of May and the beginning of the next at the start of September. The idle days of youth pre tv, pre videogames, pretty much pre everything we have today to keep you from thinking about much of anything…

Sometimes we would keep Monopoly games going for days in the garage next door. Sometimes we would just while away the time laying in a bed of clover watching the clouds blow by… That’s something every child should experience, laying in the cool soft embrace of clover. Looking for the four leafed one, watching the honey bees search from blossom to blossom… catching some in a mason jar then letting them go again. When the day comes to an end using the same mason jar to catch fireflies, then taking them in to put on the table by your bed to flash till you went to sleep.

Back then I had the upper bunk beside a double-hung window. The bottom sash was pushed up, the upper sash was pulled down and the attic fan in the hall was pulling the cool night air in thru the window. Going to sleep each night listening to the sounds of the night with a cool breeze constantly washing over me was almost heaven…

It’s probably what makes me require a fan blowing on me at night to this day…

I feel a need for more coffee….