Wet Hot American Summer

Somewhere around late July it started to get a bit old. Earlier in the summer, I raved glowingly about the near-perfect weather we’d been having here in western Massachusetts (see the From the Editor column in the July/August issue of SMAC's newsletter, The Sugarloaf Sun. Well. What a difference a few months make.

After a brief early flirtation with drought conditions, we endured several heat waves, multiple deluge-like downpours, and long stretches of high humidity and sticky surfaces. And while it might not have been the most consistently stormy summer on record, thunderstorms were not uncommon. In mid-August, a disenchanted running friend was observed forlornly posting online: “Cloudy, muggy, chance of rain... like every day before and every day to come…”. Many local runners training for the first New England Green River Marathon found it a challenge to pick out sensible or comfortable windows for getting their long runs in.

But still, it was summer. And for my part I know I did my level best to live it up while I could. Mountainy trail runs, cool dips in rivers and lakes and ponds, bike rides just for the bit of breeze you could get on them, and warm dinners outside in the twilight at any restaurant with a patio. I may like fall the best, and hey maybe I do play 2nd favorites with winter, but I firmly believe there’s much to be savored in every season, and I don’t plan to start actually complaining about any of them now. Not for more than a few sentences, at any rate. Life’s too short for whining any more than that. As I heard a woman on the radio say, “It’s just weather; you like it or not.”