Keep Cool!

It's hot.  HOT.  Not just faint-sweat-on-your-upper-lip hot---it's heat that obliterates your brain waves, leaving you incapable of any cohesive thought beyond, "Please, God, make it go away" pleas to the Almighty, or dreaming of ice baths, snowstorms, Alpine mountain passes, crisp fall winds.....or even relenting and submersing yourself in that local Petri dish of pee, the public pool.  In fact, even the previous very bloated sentence is an offense to the senses in this kind of heat.  It can get to the point where one loses hope in Mother Nature, if not all humanity.  But we find our ways to slog through it.  What gets YOU through?  I bet you have some of these same reminders of the goodness of summer:

• Sugar-free popsicles make a perfectly reasonable and delicious breakfast, lunch, or even dinner----just not all three in one day!  I eat one real meal to keep the old blood sugar balanced.  (This diet plan not approved by physicians.  Don't try this at home; don't tell my doctor.)
• I can water my lawn all night long, moving the sprinkler every couple of hours, to justify my out-of-school sleep habits of staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. and sleeping until 10.  Let me tell you, it's hard to make that schedule make sense to most people, but it is just what my internal body clock wants to run on.
• Though I mocked them above, I ADORE the smell of chlorine in a swimming pool---I even love the faint trace of the smell left on my skin after a couple of hours spent submerged in the water like a crocodile, up to my very eyeballs.  If I could afford it, adding a pool would certainly be my one big-ticket addition to my home, thus avoiding the Petri dish problems mentioned previously.  Ahem. 
• Summer has good sunrises, but positively glorious sunsets.  There's not much that can compete with the beauty of the amber haze suffusing an August sunset in Oklahoma.
• I'm not much of a vegetable fan, but man!  I love my sweet corn, and fresh green beans, and homemade sweet pickles from my grandma's recipe, all courtesy of summer's bounty in local gardens.  I am a terrible gardener, but the smells and sounds take me back more than 45 years, to when I toddled barefoot through my grandparents' and great-grandma's enormous gardens. I loved picking strawberries and eating them right off the plant. 
• And speaking of smells of summer, what can compete with the smell of hay, whether it's prairie hay or alfalfa, just cut and raked one turn? 
• In fact, this season is as abundant with gifts as with the heat.  QT cheap drinks, Sonic ice, homemade lemonade quench our thirst; we get practically delirious over the smell of rain and roses blooming by the porch; fireworks spark our hearts and our consciences, reminding us to live in gratitude; the whirr of locusts in the evening lulls us into moving a little slower, taking more pleasure in the simplest of things---which of course turn out quite often to be the most important things.
• Summer is busy for everyone else in my agribusiness family, but it's the only time I don't constantly have work waiting for me to do right away.  It's not the ideal situation for spending quality time together, but it has allowed me to spend extended time with all my nieces and nephews.  And what better excuse to do all the fun things that most parents get a little tired of:  movies and water parks and Incredible Pizza, sleepovers and fireworks and projects....ah, now that's the best of summer right there!

Next time someone asks me, "Hot out there?  "Hot enough for ya?" or  "What do you think is cooler, Hell or that sidewalk?"  I'll try to remember to think positive thoughts about summer's abundance, although I'll probably keep quiet about that.  All this talk about gardens and sunsets and summer fun could send some tired, hot person right over the edge.