Summertime, and the Living Ain’t Easy

I wrote most of this during the dog days of summer, which the internet tells me has to do with Sirius, the dog star, aligning with the sun. At any rate, I wrote most of it in early August, when it was HOT, so hot that I never got around to finishing it. It’s still hot, and we’re still waiting for the monsoons that were promised early on time heavy this fall. Keep reading, and we’ll see if I managed to finish it or not.

I commit many transgressions against humanity, in that there are many universally – universally – beloved things that are not beloved by me. Because these are so universally beloved, it seems that people take great personal offense at my transgressions.

I don’t like coffee. Or chocolate. Or cheese. Leaving food aside, I don’t like to travel.

None of these dislikes really ought to impact much of anyone else unless someone were wanting to serve me chocolate cheesecake with coffee at a destination location, but they seem to anyway. People often seem personally offended when they learn of my abhorrent preferences. Now, I may just rip the fabric of the space-time continuum with my newest dark confession: I really don’t like summer.

It’s hot. It’s noisy. There are too many people. It’s hot. It’s loud. Lawn maintenance becomes a full-time thing. It’s hot. Bugs abound and their bites take months to heal. Wildfires near and far fill the sky with smoke. Did I mention it’s hot?

I used to feel pretty benign about summer. Maybe, during my school years, it was even my favorite season, although I never disliked school. But in, let’s say, the last decade, this lack of favoritism has been steadily sliding into active dislike, and I’m now ready to put it on my list of things I really don’t enjoy. Pariah though that makes me.

It’s okay to not like winter. Almost everyone I know loves to complain about how much they don’t like winter, even if we in this part of the world are learning first-hand why it’s so important we at least tolerate it.

We had no winter for ’25-’26. We had one storm around Thanksgiving that dropped say 13/14” of snow, same as the previous year, but while one year earlier it then plummeted to 20 below and stayed there, holding the snow in place, this year it all promptly melted, and I believe our average temperatures were 25-30 degrees warmer than normal. And now we’ve bypassed the 100- and 500-year drought levels, heading straight for a 2,000-year drought level. We may, at some point, figure out first-hand why the Ancestral Puebloans abandoned their carefully-crafted cliff dwellings.

But there are still people, Lynn among them, who liked this winter much better than most.

Not me. I do like winter. I like shoveling snow, although in 2024 when we got our apparently annual Thanksgiving blizzard it just about broke me, a 30-degree day dropping wet inch after wet inch and me up on the roof of Pat’s Screen Printing, hauling heavy wet slush across the roof to dump it and getting soaking wet in the process. Four holiday days later, as the city found out to its chagrin, the sub-zero temperatures that followed that balmy storm converted everything into immovable ice that remained for the better part of three months, including on all our streets.

So winter can have its faults, but not like summer. Have I mentioned it’s hot?

Colder weather you can do things about. Put on a sweater. Put on a second sweater. Turn up the heat. Summer? There are only so many layers you can take off and around here, the notion of air conditioning is only just now thinking about gaining any traction, not having been needed for however long people have inhabited this valley.

We’re not particularly good at air conditioning, even those of us who have it. While I walk into my bank in gratitude for the much cooler air, a lovely respite from the outside heat, all the employees are bundled into their sweaters and down vests. Same thing at the hospital. There must be a way for air conditioning to work at a level that offers comfort to those working in it all day, but no one in Gunnison seems to have managed this in our preliminary experiments.

And most places go without it at all. That’s what windows and fans are for. Except that this year in our house, which generally gets to 75-ish during a summer day, has gone over 80 numerous times, and it becomes quite the game to figure out when to open windows, when to close them, and does it really make a difference or are we just fooling ourselves, the way the sad remnant of the Washington Post tells me fans don’t actually cool people down and in fact may lead to faster heat prostration, particularly among old people, of which I am nearly one.

(Apparently, since old people don’t sweat as much, and it’s not really the sweat but the evaporation of said sweat that offers a cooling mechanism, fans cause seniors in particular to delude themselves into thinking they’re cooler while their skin temperature continues to rise, leading to heat-related illness.)

So no, I just really don’t care for summer anymore. It’s scenic, and the other day – a nice bright blue sky with nary a chance of rain – the verdant hay meadows and majestic mountains still took my breath away. But that’s a blip in the on-going swelter and welter of the season.

The swelter is what makes it really intolerable. I’m from Gunnison: 75 degrees is just flat-out hot. I did hear one of the food pantry volunteers, originally from Georgia, say that 85 here is like 100 back home, and we’ve been crawling into the low 90s what seems like many times this summer. I find it impossible to think, socialize or want to do anything in those temperatures beyond throwing myself in front of a death-fan. Or wandering into an overly cool bank.

Well, now we’ve come to what I could have posted in early August, and I think if I want the world to read my confessional, I should probably quit looking for a conclusion and just post as is. It seems kind of silly to complain about the heat when we start these mornings in the low 40s F, but come back this afternoon when it’s mid-80s — Gunnison, in September, mid-80s. Why, it was just a few years ago that we got a massive snowstorm on Sept. 8. No chance of that now. I’d settle for more than 15 perfunctory drops of rain once every week.

I’d tell everyone who isn’t me to enjoy their last gasp of summer, but the way it’s going, it’s just going to keep on gasping and we’ll never get to a decent season. Not that I’m bitter or anything.