Musings on a Summer's Day

Summer is, was and will always be my favorite time of year. Something about the feel of the sun warming my hair just reaches down into my soul and makes me smile.

Yes. I have a smiling soul.

In California, summer can be measured in two ways - hot and hotter. There's 85 degrees hot, there's 95 degrees hot, and there's 105 degrees hot. Head out to Palm Springs or Lake Havasu, AZ, and you get 115 degrees hot.

Sunscreen is a necessity, but there's nothing like it. For me, it's almost like the feeling I get when I'm sitting with a cup of my mom's fresh hot chocolate in front of the fireplace, watching the orange and red flames in their glowing dance. But there's one big difference between the two. Feeling the fire warming my skin and hair makes me feel like an old soul; even when I was seven or eight years old, I felt as if I'd been sitting watching fires for a thousand years (in the most non-pyro way possible). Getting that same feeling from the sun, though, makes me feel unabashedly young. When I'm seventy or eighty, I imagine that I'll feel the sun warming the hair on my head, and the skin just below my eyes, and I'll close my eyes and imagine I'm seven again.

The east coast, though, has another way of measuring the heat - humidity. If you walked down the street with a gigantic fist closing in around you, it couldn't be more stifling than a day of 91 degree temperatures coupled with 98 humidity.

Today I walked around in D.C. from the Glover Park neighborhood down to Georgetown. Half an hour after I got to my sister's apartment, the skies turned gray and I expect any moment now the deluge that inevitably follows several days of sweltering humidity will begin. But it'll only last an hour or two. The clouds will fall away in time to go out and watch the sun set over Virginia.

And tomorrow, the sun will come out again.