Places

For someone that doesn't particularly like heat, I have a number of nostalgic memories of summer from the various places that I've lived.

In Milwaukee summer meant weekly bike rides to the neighborhood frozen custard shop, festivals at the lakeshore and the Friday fish fry, to go, brought to the various parks along the lake. The atmosphere in my mind was like a more humid Seattle - generally not hot with a nice breeze off the water. Not many places have air conditioning, so the city slowed down a bit and lived outside for a few months.

Then we moved to Charlotte. Summer there is different - for one there's about 6 months of it. The other is the pervasiveness of air conditioning. It is pretty much a requirement in that climate to be sure, however it changes the approach to summer. As a kid growing up there we'd play basketball or baseball for an hour or two, then sit inside with a cold soda and video games for an hour. Bike rides to downtown Matthews were followed with more cold drinks in the air conditioning. It also shifted the focus of the day into the evening. The best time to play sports with friends was when you could barely see the ball, since it was finally not too hot.

College in Raleigh - I didn't approach it the right way in many respects. However once I started spending the summers there I gained a different understanding of the south during that time of year. In Charlotte life doesn't really change with the seasons - it's a collection of environmentally isolated buildings that just continues with business as usual all year. Raleigh is both small enough and a college town that the slow southern summer is still a part of life. I learned to value morning walks in the old neighborhoods of town. On the weekends I'd wake up about 7 and go out for a walk until lunch. Walking on the shady side of the street at all costs, the smell of the humidity and clay soil and waxy magnolia tree leaves baking in the sun - seeing the garage sales and farmers' markets - it was nice. A lot of businesses closed or ran reduced hours when the universities were out of session. It was quiet, and slow and peaceful.

The 4 year return to Charlotte was to be honest, a mess. I didn't give myself any time, and the seasons were absent for the most part. Two minor things stand out in my mind as nice summer memories though. The apartment at Phillips Place had two doors that opened up to a courtyard and fountain. Sunday nights in the summer the NPR station had a program called Nightscapes - some world music, some electronic jazz, it was a proper soundtrack for lounging around the apartment with the doors open and the running water background noise - very relaxing. Also, a work habit that I tried to keep up for sanity sake was taking the full hour, perhaps slightly more, for lunch each day, whether I needed it or not. A result of this is that over time I was able to walk every street in the downtown and near-downtown grid in Charlotte. It was nice, in the summer, to find the few shady park benches around downtown and watch the leaves slowly shift in the nearly imperceptible breeze.

The Seattle experience has been a tale of two seasons - the rainy season - which makes me want to leave every April or May or June - it just drags on. Then summer. It is glorious. However I probably won't know what I'll miss until I move on.