Summer isn’t my best time

Some people live for summer. I’m not sure if that is a holdover from when we were all in school and had summers off and that’s when we were FREE and all the fun happened. We didn’t have to go to school or be ANYWHERE! We could go swimming every day! I know that I looked forward to summers when I was young. But I am 64 now. That was a long time ago.

As we get older the seasons affect us differently. Here is what I wrote to a dear one this morning…

“Interestingly summer has always been a hard time for me. I hate the heat and don’t do well in it at all. Each year summer comes and my mood just goes dark and I feel lost and I don’t remember why and then my dear friend Jeff, my closest friend for the last 20 years, will say to me, “Honey, don’t you remember, you get like this every year at this time…” And then I remember. When autumn comes and the weather cools, which here is at least October, sometimes almost November before it really cools, it’s like my whole body heaves a sigh of relief and I finally breathe. Autumn has always been my favorite time of the year since I was very young. Here it is too warm for too long for me. I wish it was cool earlier and later and longer like it was in the midwest where I grew up when by October you had to wear a sweater, we always called it “sweater weather.” And then real winters when there was snow, and white Christmases. I dream of those times…”

I’m not sure if some people drift through the seasons, having their good days and bad as we all will but no so much directed by the season itself. For me summer is when I have to “batten down the hatches” and simply make it through. Here, on the coast of North Carolina, in Wilmington, it is also hurricane season. I have lived through hurricanes where we were without power for a week and barely survived the heat. Of course I haven’t lived through a Hurricane Katrina, or the horrors of what people lived through last year in Puerto Rico, God bless them, but in my own little corner of the world, living alone, when a hurricane might come it is scary.

Yesterday I was out doing a number of errands after therapy and finally, at my last stop, I wasn’t sure I could quite make it through. The heat and humidity were so intense my glasses fogged up as soon as I got out of the car and you could just feel the humidity pushing you DOWN. And you don’t need to tell me stories about how much worse it is elsewhere or how I don’t begin to know how other people suffer. I know all of that and sympathize but when it’s your life and your world it matters to you and can be hard especially when hanging onto your mental health has been a life-long challenge, precarious at best, and world’s worst when summer, for me, comes. We are only about half way through summer.

It is interesting, to me, how different people are affected differently by the seasons. I know people who hate winter with a passion, dread it, can’t bear to be cold. For me the colder temperatures are such a relief I can barely explain it. Of course while it doesn’t stay cool enough long enough here in our warm coastal region for me my eldest daughter and her family live in Chicago and they nearly freeze to death for months on end there. It’s all relative, I understand. But what I am wondering is not just how the weather patterns affect one physically but how it affects one’s mental health. If you have a history of serious clinical depression, an anxiety disorder that has been crippling throughout your life, PTSD and bipolar disorder, what does the heat do to you, or rather me? It is me I’m talking about here. What does heat do to my brain? And the sun. It’s as though the world is TOO BRIGHT and I can barely stand it. It is blinding to me. Now, mind, when we’ve had weather like we’ve had lately when there has barely been a day in 2 weeks when it hasn’t been raining and at noon it may have been dark as night I don’t do well then either. A moderate amount of sunshine and cooler temperatures is when I feel best. Give me October. October every time. It is my favorite month of the year.

The sun is shining here now, a nice kind of sun, dappled shade coming through my trees. I live in a very old neighborhood with huge old trees. My back yard and the area over and around my deck are so overhung with trees the windows all around my studio look out onto a green world where I see nothing but huge trees. It is beautiful, it is, for the most part, too shady for things to grow well except in a couple of spots, and it gives me just the cover I need visually right now. Dappled shade and air conditioning are how I survive. But still I am out several times a day with the dogs and I can actually feel my mood plummet if I am out too long in the heat this time of year.

I am just kind of drifting today, in my thoughts, thinking about things, about my recent dip in mood (My dear friend wrote to me last night to tell me that my post yesterday made her so sad, and I felt badly about that.) and how it happens at this time of year, each year (which I always forget until Jeff reminds me) and wondering how I might best manage this. Dreading one whole season every year doesn’t bode well being that it will take up a quarter of your life ongoing. The heat has bothered me far worse as I’ve gotten older which, I’m sure, is a big part of the reason my zest for gardening has left me. But one can’t stay holed up in air conditioning for a quarter of the rest of their life, or can they? I wonder.

Just now I am looking all around two long sides of my studio out the beautiful windows at the dappled shade. This, this is perfect. In this moment I feel good. I’ll take one moment at a time and do my best with it. I’m okay right now. It’s a pretty good day.