Enough Summer Already

I don't really like summer. I just tolerate it with forbearance and keep up my hope for the cooler days I know will follow soon. I have no choice. Technically, Summer ends in late September, but who's counting the months any more. I just want summer to be done.

As I listen to the sound of crickets faithfully clicking outside through the open window, I enjoy their soft life-song. There's not much I cherish about the summer season, but invisible crickets chirping steadily, their metronome in sync, is one of the small consolations to the heat.

Their short little lives are always lived out in the hot, dry grasses and brown dusty dirt of the horse pasture and the land out back of our house. For them summer is everything. It is their destiny and eternity all wrapped up into a few short months. Contentment with heat, feasting upon what ever crickets eat, stiffened grass blades, persistent weeds, and laying eggs to hatch next year when the weather turns just right. That is life to a cricket. That and having their legs ripped of by experimental boys.

The songs of summer.

Then the sound of my orange-vanilla cream cat, Jimmy-cat, meowing cat, spiral-swirling patterned cat, eating a fat gopher on the porch always creeps me out. I call out, "Good boy Jimmy," when he meows loudly upon his arrival to the screen door; he likes to shows off his bounty for the evening. I get up and walk to see him. He has the trophy in his mouth still and meows again through the taste of fur. He places the gopher on the stoop; indeed, it's about the size of his head. Then it appears my acknowledgment of his kill is permission to begin dining. I move back to my hard bench seat and continue to type, tuning out the sound of miniature bones breaking as he eats his rodent prize.

The wooden seat beneath my bones numbs me, but does not remove the heat from the air.

Lime pop-sickles are a saving grace and cold comfort to the night, which is just too hot. When will the cool come? When crickets no longer chirp. The sound of silence in the darkened night beckons the new season. It's not here yet...

Earlier in the day, I spitefully opened the door to the full day's heat, walking out back to feed my horses. I long for winter, rain, misty air floating with fairy-like drizzle, cool water drip-dropping on my face in asymmetrical rhythms. I long to see the random flowing of water droplets across my window, dancing their way down the pane where they collect on the sill and then fall again to earth, proving gravity still works.

The dust kicked up by the milling equines reminds me they live in it. Exposed, engulfed, encapsulated by the element of heat and the pressing sun. The suns rays bore into my skin like a tick burrowing for blood. Shade, where is the shade? I sweat. I melt. The horses persevere. They were built for heat and cold. They don't seem to mind. They have trees to stand beneath. The shade is theirs, but they will still opt to roast in the sun.

A random helicopter and the sound of passing cars cut through the night air, the tell-tale signs of other lives, other people, other paths moving through the heat. A motorcycle rips across the valley, it's engine screaming happily; I can hear it moving south along our country road, the noise lingers, the sound fades incrementally, and then is gone.

Loud, demanding meows from the Oreo cookie cat, cookies and cream cat, black and white monster cat, Shmobie-cat brings me out from my absent minded reveries. I am the automatic door opener. He still has not figured out how to come through the broken screen door, the most recent casualty of my kids destruction. I let him in, swinging open the cheap metal door who's screen mesh floats away from the frame oh so effortlessly.

I await the coolness that should have been here by now. I want the draft from my window to float across the room bringing all its refreshing goodness with it. It is not here. I am still waiting.