The Trouble with Summer

Now that Adventure Camp is over until mid-July, my daily routine of walks around the forest is getting back to normal. I’m already surprised at the difference just a few days away has made. After the spring wildflowers finished their blooms, I had a week or so before the summer wildflowers started. For that week, few blooms were in evidence, and the landscape seemed an unremitting green. This week, I have new blooms and new colors again!

St. John’s Wort is starting to bloom. The various clovers are blooming. More daisies are in bloom. The Queen Anne’s lace is out, plus the purple ironweed and blooming raspberry. The day lilies or farmer lilies line the roadsides. In short, everything around me is colorful again.

Readers of this blog know that I am not a summer person. Give me snow and winter any day, but barring that fall is fine, and I’m starting to really enjoy that after winter, early spring time before the leaves come out. I have tried, seriously tried, to enjoy summer, but I'm not very good at it, and I'm tempted to stop trying altogether and just spend 2-3 months in a grumpy funk.

In summer, I really have to look hard for something about it to enjoy. Here's why I don't like summer: heat and humidity, lightning and the threat of fire, my view obscured by leaves, deerflies, no new birds to see. Well, I could make this list longer but you get the picture, I’m sure. So that week between spring and summer without new wildflowers feels like an eternity to me. But now, that week is over, the summer wildflowers are here, and I have something to enjoy again about summer. At last!