Dog Days of Summer

When I was growing up, my mother would use this phrase to describe the back half of summer.  The really hot and humid part of summer.  The kind of humidity unknown to my current neighbors in coastal Southern California.  They associate humidity with exotic places like India and South America. Maybe Hawaii on a bad day(is there such a thing?). But, most of the people in the rest of the country suffer through days so sticky and hazy and hot that they they have to invent euphemisms to describe it. Hence- the dog days of summer.

We didn't have air conditioning ( and I had to ride a sled to the bus stop in the winter, but that's a post for a different season).  We suffered.  We showered several times a day.  We tossed and turned at night.  We swam a lot in the lakes. Except my mother would never let me go swim in the lakes during last three weeks of August.  You see, the lake that I went to the most was barely a lake. Our town had this darling little body of water called Lake Park.  I use the word darling because it was tiny.  Because it had paddle bats and a dancehall.  Darling, right?   

Because of its small size, my mother decided that by the end of the summer, that small lake was really one giant petri dish of communal germs.  She imagined legions of poorly supervised children ( hardly daring to believe I was one of them) peeing in that water,and deemed it unsafe to swim in after two months of fermenting in the hot, Ohio sun.  Heavily chlorinated pools passed the mom cleanliness test. She knew that kids still peed, but reasoned that the chemicals zapped away the offending biomaterial. Lake or pool, my surface temperature was rarely cool enough for me to be comfortably out of the water for more than the 10 minutes every hour the lifeguards made us rest.

Do you remember the first time you got to swim during adult swim time?  More than voting, this seemed the ultimate stamp of adulthood.  I can go to war (sort of), vote, and swim when the kids have to sit on the sidelines!   With the title of adult, certain other things are also assumed.  Namely, that  I will no longer pee in the pool. 

It's way past the Fourth of July, and I am still using a down blanket at night.  Here, on the coast of Southern California, the nights are cool.  The days are finally sunny and warm after a long spring of partly cloudy haze.  My kids go to the ocean, where the pee mingles with the sea and it comes out clean. ish.  

My children will never fully know the feeling of being too hot for ice cream. The kind of hot where the ice cream melts before you can eat it and it runs down your arm and adds to the already sticky film that humidity lays on you.  In today's wonderful world of AC, they will never know that feeling of loitering in the convenience stores for the frigid air. 

They do  have their own definition of Dog Days.  For our Southern Californian family, Disneyland is off limits the months of July and August.  There are just too many people to make it a fun experience. Maybe, if family or close friends from out of town come to visit, will I permit them to go to the Happiest Place on Earth.  I'm sure they look longingly at the Disneyland homepage, much in the same way that I gazed at Lake Park through the dirty car window when my mother whizzed past it on the way to the pool.

Lake Park.  Disneyland.  Choose your own Dog Day.  Let the kids suffer.  Let them languish.  They will lament, and whine and talk about you on their facebook page with their real friends. And maybe, someday, they will understand the real joy of a lazy summer day.

Comments

[Kathy Sena]

Oh, Amy, this is just a delicious post. For a kid like me, who spent her early summers in muggy Ohio, you nailed it, right down the the ice cream melting down my arm. LOVE your writing.

[Emily]

Hi, Amy! I am happy to report that the Ohio summer this year has been mostly delightful. High of 71 tomorrow, July 18!! I'll have to wear long sleeves to the evening Columbus Crew soccer game. Even yesterday, when it was in the mid-80s, it was breezy rather than humid. I don't doubt the humidity is on its way, just in time for the Ohio State Fair. But so far, we have been lucky. You probably got a taste of that when you were here, I am just realizing...

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