It’s hot.
Ridiculously hot. Several hundred
levels of Hell hot, including Satan’s kitchen, Satan’s armpit, Satan’s
butthole, and other places and parts of Satan that probably exist and shouldn’t
and I don’t care to know about them. All
I know is that I’m miserable as hell and I’m counting down the days to 17
inches of ice and snow, and at this point I will gladly withstand several hours
of Elvis Presley crooning “Blue Christmas” until I impale myself on an icicle,
as long as said icicle is cold and refreshing.
People love summer. Gosh,
they just LURRRRRRVE summer. Summer! Yay, summer!
There’s dancing snowmen who love summer. There's memes all over Facebook telling folks how they want to be
sitting on a completely secluded beach (always empty!) with a cold drink and an
umbrella, giving us that stellar vista of blue water, clear sky, and
perfectly-placed flip-flops, toes-up in the sugar-white sand, probably with some
type of tropical flower (plastic optional) of an contrasting color (orange or
pink seem to be the norm) artistically placed somewhere nearby, with a lovely sea
shell set at a 45-degree angle or some shit like that. Summer!
Yay!
Yeah. Yay.
Here’s my reality check, in the middle of this August day: Summer is nothing but steaming, muggy,
baking, frying, wretched fucking heat. Enormous
electric bills because of the 9,423,203,472 fans and air conditioners set up in
my house to keep the temperature palatable.
Lightning storms whose fat black clouds promise lots of rain and then just
splatter out a couple of drops. Water
shortages. Dead grass. Dying plants, which I spent a fortune on in
springtime and am now struggling to keep the bastards alive.
 |
| You SUCK. |
And, of course, bugs.
Let’s not forget the goddamned bugs.
Not flittering butterflies and blinking fireflies, like you see on the Facebook
posts of the “Yay Summer” crowd. I’m
talking BUGS. Billions of enormous cicadas
shrieking their sex songs in the trees until well after 9pm, falling on me from
the branches when they lose their grip on the bark. (That’s always a good time.) Praying mantises the size of sanitation
trucks munching out on monstrous crickets while hanging out on my front door,
conveniently camouflaging themselves from my view until my hand is almost on
top of them. (Insert steamwhistle
shrieking here.) Wasps, whose sole
purpose in life is to sting everything that moves, simply because…well, because
they’re assholes, that’s why. Unidentifiable
creatures with hundreds of legs and eyes, hiding out, watching, just waiting to
see what I’ll do when I notice them.
And since it’s mid-August, it’ll soon be time for Spider
Days! Yes, Spider Days, ladies and
gentlemen, that time of year when the Arachnid Olympics takes place around my
homestead. Spiders with 2-inch leg spans
compete to see who can build the most vast, State-sized webs…webs they build
anywhere and everywhere there’s a place to fasten a piece of web. Between telephone wires. From low-hanging tree branches to the ground,
usually on my back-porch path. My
favorite is between my carport wall and my car, which I can’t see at 5:30 in
the morning, and of course I walk right into them. I get my entire cardio exercise for one week
done in the screaming spider web dance I perform when that happens. I don’t care that it’s 5:30 in the morning, I’m
in the middle of a fucking web, that spider could be anywhere on my body, and I
will NOT be silent!
I am counting the days until winter, people. Until then, I will hunker down beside the A/C,
and will continue writing the next story.
I will continue to pour water on my fading plants. And I will buy Raid. Lots and lots of Raid. Butterflies and fireflies, beware, I don’t
check my spray.
Think snow,
Rebecca
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