I know. Ten days without checking in again and the internet moves along at such a frenetic clip my cycle of news for you barely exists for a moment before dropping you into the next tidbit that you seek out online.
What's happening? My grapes aren't quite ready, the red ones anyway. I eat the green ones by the handful, barely avoiding certain death by the giant bald-faced hornets that seem hellbent on making another summer memory for me. Lochlan says I am hilarious and he lives for this. I go into every summer marvelling at the long light, the warmth, the sting of salt on sweat, the gardening possibilities, and then I run screaming from it just as quickly, resenting the oppressive heat, traffic, tourists and the sheer work of gardening involved. The bugs. The endless mowing. The endless cleaning of the pool. The endless ruination of all of my bathing suits so quickly as the chlorine rips them apart and I tend to sleep in the pool. PJ called me a human sous-vide once and I cracked back an insult about fetishes of sealing people in plastic and eating them later and all he did was laugh until he started to wheeze.
(PJ doesn't like the heat either.)
By the end of summer I am spilling blueberries out of a mug in a race to get them all, the bottoms of my feet are black from the dust, from the sand and the pavement and the dirt and my skin is faint golden, buried under a million freckles that appear seemingly out of nowhere. I am wild-eyed and now offended by the early end to the evenings and the tourists leaving the town high and dry far too early and the Back to School adverts and the Christmas displays in stores.
He said it's like the five stages of grief but I go into it mourning summer and then finally find acceptance and even enthusiasm.
Even as he yells at me to go back outside and scrub my toes before I leave little sooty footprints all over the white carpet, something I categorically denied until he pointed out my feet are size six and the next closest is him at eleven so it's pretty obvious it was me.
I just shake my head and keep eating blackberries. No wasps in these ones. Only spiders. Yum.