We had joy, we had fun…

Summer lost a lot of novelty for me when I graduated from high school and ceased getting it off, and honestly, I’m not all that crazy about it. It’s holding its own against winter for the moment, but summer is in a solid third place in Bo’s grand ranking of the seasons.

There are summer things I enjoy. I like swimming and playing in Smith Lake, and Independence Day is my favorite holiday. But day to day, it means mosquitoes, poison ivy, yardwork, sweating like an effin’ meat loaf from walking 30 seconds in a parking lot, and never having the windows open (too hot in the daytime, too humid at night).

Fall is my favorite. Fall means football, Big Spring Jam, the return of reliable thunderstorms, and evenings in that magic zone of 54 to 62 degrees–warm enough to sit outside and sip something, but cool enough that whatever mosquitoes are left are roosting. I’m certain that heaven is a lot like fall in northern Alabama.

Spring means a lot of that too, of course, and that keeps it in second place, but it also means pollen. For many people (including me), that means eating Claritin like M&Ms, which cuts the suffering to “erratically marginally tolerable” from “somebody please cut my damned head off so I can breathe.”

Winter is easily my least favorite season. I don’t like sustained cold weather. I like for it to snow enough a time or two to shut the town down (which is only about two inches here, as we don’t have plows, and if snow and/or ice is in the forecast, then you’d best get your happy ass to the grocery store and get bread and milk, because if you don’t, then you and everyone you love will die), but by the time I get all of our papers together for our accountant I’m ready for it to be over with. It rarely complies with my wishes.

I was out smoking with Jack at my last job with such in the forecast, and he said “so you made your winter storm run yet?” I smiled and said “Jack Daniel’s and Marlboro Lights? Yup, we’re set!”

It’s actually been quite mild for the past several winters ’round these parts. In 2006, our last hard freeze for the season occurred in January. But my tolerance for cold weather is low enough that it’s pretty much guaranteed I’m living as far north as I ever will right now.

I’ve been on business to places with “real” winters during the winter months. Watertown, NY was interesting. I was there for a week, and it never stopped snowing. I’d never seen that before, and driving back to the airport in Syracuse was a frosty little slice of hell. But I’ve always been serendipitously spared the trip to Chicago or Minneapolis when the high was 20 below and the wind never fell below 15 mph.

At the end of the day, while I relish the big town/small town balance in the Huntsville area, it’s probably fall here that clinches it for me as a place I really enjoy living.

And for me, the best thing about summer is that fall is coming.

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