Summer SAD

Complaining about the weather is one of my best traits. It's not the best thing about me. I'm just really good at it. I can deal with cold in the winter and hot in the summer. What I can't handle is cold in the summer. I grew up in New York. Part of the time we lived by a lake. Part of the time we had a sailboat and sailed across Long Island Sound.

To me, summer is waking up on the boat, sitting in the cockpit eating cereal in a bathing suit. It's not wearing real shoes all summer long - rarely wearing shoes at all. It's eating dinner outdoors every night and only closing windows if a rain storm is blowing sideways. It's the smell of raindrops on hot pavement. Swimming in the rain. Running around in the grass chasing fireflies. It's those nights that are so sweltering you keep standing in a cool shower and it's so humid you never dry off. I have never once lived with air conditioning, but somehow we managed.

Thirty six years in California and I still deeply miss East Coast summers. I miss not having to layer clothing throughout the day. It's on. It's off. In real summer you put something on and it stays the same until you go to bed. When I was in New York recently I left the apartment at eight a.m. in a summer dress which I was still wearing when we went out for a walk at ten p.m. I flashed on the trunk of my car at home. A blanket, a down vest, a jean jacket. All very much used in summer to keep me warm.

The problem is, we're quite close to the ocean. As the crow flies it's probably less than five miles, but driving there takes thirty minutes over a treacherous mountain road. The other problem is the ocean is the Pacific Ocean, which is bitter cold and not very user-friendly. Unless you're a surfer and want to wrap yourself in neoprene from head to toe, what's the point? On the rare warm day it is truly gorgeous to lie on Stinson beach. Just don't expect to go swimming. The water is 58 degrees.

Personally, I don't get much benefit from living near the ocean and there is a LOT of negative. It's called fog. Simply put, fog ruins my summer. It sometimes feels like its ruining my life. In the best case scenario is we'll we have a few "hot" days in a row, then the fog will barrel back in with a vengeance. To punish me. The more likely pattern is like this summer. For five weeks we did not have a single sunny morning. Gray, drizzly skies every damn day. Some days the fog would burn off by eleven or two, but it was back in every evening. It's probably just me, but I need a sunny morning once in a while, especially in "summer".

It's been well documented that in winter people can suffer from depression caused by a lack of light- Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD. I recently decided I had summer SAD. My sister, Laura, who lives even closer to the ocean than I do, buys special ultra-violet lightbulbs to sit near in August. It's to ward off her depression due to a lack of sunlight. It's not just sun you don't get to see, it's also the moon and stars. We went through a whole phase of the moon and I never saw it. So there you go. It's the disgruntled rant that my family has lived with for so long. It's time to stop complaining and find a solution.

I've been hoping to inherit a cabin on a lake, but so far, none have been forthcoming. If I could just pick up our town and move it over the next range of hills, the situation would improve dramatically. Alas, that's just not practical. After much careful thought, I've concluded we need to change the calendar. We get our best weather in September and October. It's usually quite warm. Just when the kids go back to school. It's the closest we get to consistent beach weather. Of course, the water warms up a little and the sharks come out. We only personally know one guy who's been attacked by a shark, so the statistics are in our favor.

The calendar just needs to shift two months. July will now be September and August will be October. No more drizzly Memorial Days and weirdly warm Thanksgivings. The kids can have their vacation when the weather is best and I can have my summer. We won't expect the weather to be nice in June and July, because it will really be May and June. Everything will be so much better, but I haven't figured out what to do about the leaves changing on the Fourth of July. I can't really think anymore about it now. We're having a sunny morning. The second in a row, but who's counting? I even saw the moon last night.