Summer usually doesn't have a lot of special significance to me. I don't get time off from work to sleep in and lounge about for the rest of the day. The change in temperature occurs long before the calendar tells me the season has started.
To me, summer just means it's gonna get hotter. I'm a Fall and Winter kind of guy.
The main change is that more a little more time is spent on the weekends around the pool. Watching a little bit more baseball. And definitely sweating quite a bit more.
Even though the first official day of summer was a few days a ago, it started today for me. On the way home from brunch, we stopped at Brooks Brothers for a new swimsuit. Fortunately, we also had to stop at the grocery store for a few items. As we walked in, we were promptly greeted by a stand of Bing Cherries.
Bing Cherries remind me of childhood summer trips to western Colorado. No trip was complete without stopping to a roadside orchard and buying several pounds of cherries. One for immediate gratification, several more stashed away in the cooler in the trunk to enjoy once we got back home.
A few years ago, Melissa made her first trip to Colorado with my family. Her favorite memory was watching my mother (who is normally very reserved) in the courtyard of our hotel merrily picking cherries directly from the tree and popping them in her mouth. As this is was the area where she was born and raised, it was quite common in her childhood to get her fill of fruit without going to a store at all. Melissa mentioned that she had never seen my mother so happy before.
Of course, I got my own bag of cherries, came home, sat on the couch, and popped one after another into my mouth until my belly got full.
It almost makes the heat bearable. Almost.
