Dear Diary, to experience one dog day of summer.
I came across this journal entry from January. I think it was a Friday, though not sure. Some days I write the day of the week along with the date, sometimes I don’t. On that day five months ago I wrote:
“Transport me in time to early June, when I can rise early to walk the dog surrounded by warm air as a fish swims through water. No need to roll out of bed in the black of night, pulling on jeans, shirt, sweatshirt, coat, hat, gloves – along with socks and shoes — while trying to stay square on the heating grate.
I wish for tea with crushed ice, lemon slice and two Sweet’N Lows. All served in a tumbler with sweat rolling down its sides sinking into the paper napkin on which it rests. Iced tea to drink instead of the coffee cup that stays within three inches of my right hand.
Did I mention not having to tug on sweatshirt, jeans and an overcoat to walk the dog in freezing black?
I long to unhook the wire fence to the garden and rub a tomato vine between my fingers, inhaling deeply, becoming intoxicated on the scent of summer.
Dear God if a trip to the beach was only a few days away and not after enduring months of doom. To know that salt on my lips from a body of water rather than the rim of a glass was just a four hour drive. The car parked, I’d run toward the ocean picking my way through toddlers with purple sand scoops, teenage girls with wet braided hair wearing string bikinis and figures they will never have again in their lifetimes and mothers who occasionally look up from sandy, crumbing paperback copies of “Valley of the Dolls” unearthed from shelves in their rented condos to scan the ocean for a bobbing child’s head.
I could enter the water unnoticed…not like now, in the depth of gray cruel frozen January. When out on the windswept frigid beach, alone save the call of a few gulls – I’d appear as the climactic scene of some romance novel in which the heroine just found out everyone and everything she once thought true was false; a women in the throes of midlife who was holding it all together until they took Intercession from her.
If it was June instead of January, the children would chase fireflies late into the evening. And the crawl from the bed every morning would be greeted with the first rays of a sun that set only hours before, instead of the eternal night of January where no one cheers except for those remotely interested in watching the Flyers and Penguins whip about on ice. Ice, ice and more ice.
Each day would hold promise of something wonderful – and even if nothing special happened – I still could go outside early and walk the dog in flip flops, t-shirt and shorts.”
After reading those thoughts again, no rain, 100 degrees and brown is the new green in lawn color doesn’t seem so bad.
Well, maybe it is. But I can still walk the dog….
