Go Outside and Play
Jessie: In New Hampshire where the dragonflies have sent the black flies packing!
Do you live somewhere with wildly varying seasons? Here in New England, the change in weather prompts me to want nothing so much as the chance to go outside and play. That urge causes me to alter my routines and lifestyle to a surprising extent. For instance, my morning routine of coffee, reading, and meditation takes place in the library in the cold months. My dog Sam knows to race up the stairs and station himself in one of the wingback chairs just as soon as I lift my espresso cup away from the machine, at least as long as the heat vents pump out hot air. But as soon as the furnace is switched off he waits patiently by the back door each morning instead. He knows that when the air has warmed we move the whole operation to the screen house.
I lug a record player and a slew of vinyl to the deck and spend the afternoons sipping espresso tonics and listening to big-band music as I pick through administrative tasks on a laptop. I lay in a supply of candles and fill the oil lamps to facilitate nighttime reading out of doors. I move houseplants from their winter spaces to sunny patches outside. Even my knitting bag finds its way to the deck where I knit lacy items and small projects that won’t cling stickily to my fingers in the heat rather than the Icelandic sweaters that I favor in colder months.
Dinners are cooked over the grill and eaten on the patio even when there are only a couple of us present to enjoy the meal. The house is filled with fresh flowers from the yard. Neighbors I haven’t seen since before the first snowfall last season stop by to chat when they spot me weeding the front gardens. I hike up a hill each morning with my son instead of watching foreign crime shows while using my treadmill.
This year I even purchased a mobile version of the Dragon Dictation software in order to move my writing life outside. My eighth Beryl and Edwina novel is due on September 1, but I don’t want to miss a moment of this deliriously delicious season shut away in my office. After all, despite the fact that there are four seasons here, summer always seems to be the most fleeting.
Readers, do you have four seasons in your part of the world? If not, do you wish that you did? What do you do differently in the summer than in the colder months?
