My name is Kerri and I’ve been a wife to Jay for 15 years (as of July 4th) and a mom to an amazing daughter, Rachel, who lights up my life every day. I’ve had a number of blogs over the years since 2004, mostly for flexing my writing skills as I hope to publish a teen fantasy novel currently in progress.
My Summer Song
Okay, it’s more like a moan. I do not like the summer. It’s the heat. And the bugs. And the sweating even when you’re sitting still. Give me Spring, Winter, Fall. I’ll take them all. Just let me sleep through summer in an air conditioned house set at 65 degrees and hermetically sealed to keep the bugs out.
Of course, that’s not happening. Our a/c has been on its last legs for a couple of years now, so we don’t run it until the worst part of summer hits – mid July and August, usually. We run fans full blast all night upstairs and as soon as I rise in the morning we get the windows opened and the fans going downstairs to suck in the cooler air. One of the beauties of living in Colorado is that it does cool off, at least somewhat, almost every night. It’s not unusual to have a 20 or even 30 degree drop over night. Thank goodness, because the lovely result of my misery in the heat is I’m the queen of crabby. I just can’t help it, I tell my family.
My hatred dislike of bugs has a number of causes. When I was still in my teens, I watched an episode of ‘Night Gallery’ titled ‘The Caterpillar’ in which a man who desired a colleague’s wife pays an accomplice to put an earwig in the ear of the unsuspecting husband. In a twist of fate, the accomplice accidentally enters the room of the man who hired him and places it in his ear instead. After suffering through horrible pain as the earwig eats through his brain and exits the other side, a doctor called to aid him tells him the ordeal is not over as the earwig has laid eggs en route through his brain and he is now host to all of them. Fun, eh? Now, many years later, I still pull my hair over my ear when I roll onto my side at night. My husband says I do this even in a deep sleep. Hey, those earwigs can climb up on the ceiling. I’ve seen them.
I also was cursed blessed to have grown up with two brothers who thought it hilarious to hold grasshoppers over my face, screaming, “It’s going to spit tobacco all over you!” and rubbing the wings of miller moths with the taunt, “It’s going to get its wing dust all over you!” as if these things were some sort of poison. To me, they were certainly great horrors, to say the least. And they took great pleasure in their evil deeds games. They could not have known they would be forever damaging my psyche or could they?. With some sort of miracle, I avoided a life in a straight jacket but retained my fear dislike of the creeping, crawling things of this world and have broken my husband’s heart with a refusal to ever enjoy a new life in Tahiti or some other tropical place. I can barely endure the bug population here, can you imagine what would happen to me there????
And one more thing, I was a redhead when I was a kid. In fact, until my 30’s. My skin is fair and tender around sunlight, like a vampire’s as it smokes, burning in the UV rays, so I stay out of the sunlight mostly and sunscreen heavily when I must be in it.
So, for those of you who enjoy the heat, the sun, the bugs of summer – go forward and enjoy the next couple of months. As for me and my pale skin, I’ll enjoy my retirement in Alaska during the summer (mostly just mosquitoes is what I hear) and right here in Colorado during the winter.
RSS Feed