Hello, July
we aren't exactly friends, but I'll cope
Summer is my least favorite season. There are many aspects of it I like, even love. But it and my body are constantly at war. If I never saw temps over 75 degrees F ever again, I would be a happy woman. June where I live is, as of late, generally beautiful. Long sunlight and cool temps. And I begin to think “oh hey, summer isn’t so bad after all.”
Then July hits. And of course it’s been officially summer for only a bit now. And suddenly I’m sweating and can’t breathe the second I step outside. My daily walks suffer a cutback in length. And I am consistently irritated at…well, everything. Especially since my indoor buddy, our cat Mina, is no longer here to keep me company on these hottest days where I stay inside.
It’s a real struggle. I love seasonal living, and matching my food, reading, activities, and music to the season. But I long for the snow when we are about as far away from that as we can get.
Nonetheless, I’ve set myself a challenge for this sweltering month. I am working on writing more, so I have challenged myself to handwrite something every single day. It can be a few paragraphs, fiction/nonfiction/poetry, but this is separate from my daily personal journalling. I’ve been struggling to write beyond that personal journal for a long time now, and I am hopeful that this challenge is the rekindling of an old habit.
The number of drafts I have saved up on here that I started and abandoned over the past few months since our cat died is…a lot. I want to write about her and pet grief, but even typing these few words out have tears springing to my eyes.
But I digress. Summer is hard, and it’s all I can do to reframe it some days, particularly when it seems much of society is the opposite of me. (I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian, this isn’t a surprise.)
But I can write about it. Right?
Thanks for being here in this space. I appreciate each of you. Eventually my posts will have some sort of coherence, I promise.
Girl! I feel the same way. Even the boys haven’t wanted to go outside except for 5-10 minutes after dinner this week…*overnight* lows have been in the 70s lately.