As of this week, I will have lived in New England for damn near a decade—longer than I’ve lived anywhere else—making it my first-ever “Home I Picked” rather than a “Home I Got Moved to/Birthed in the General Vicinity of.” That faint whirring noise you can hear in the background is the sound of my carpetbagging grandfather spinning in his grave. Which is really weird, ’cause we got that dude cremated.
So, while I’m still Southern enough to say, not be surprised in the slightest by Paula Deen’s business casual racism, I’ve osmosis-fied enough Northern-ness to get genuinely excited by the prospect of summer.
Or more specifically, leaving air conditioning and shelter during daylight hours to then engage in activities for the next few months.
See, in the South, we don’t have “summer” the way it’s understood here—we have “outside.” And outside is pretty much just a couple lazy riffs on the same power chord of warm. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not-so-nice, but it’s never surprising.
It’s just there, like seersucker and diabetes.
But over the years I’ve lived here, I’ve actually gotten used to the idea that something as theoretically mundane as eating and drinking not-indoors can be fucking exhilarating—something that, when somebody works up the courage to first propose it, it sounds like you’re about to embark on some dangerous and oddly sexual adventure. “You guys wanna do it? You guys wanna sit outside?”
So, while you’re taking a page from this week’s feature and smugging it up on some patch of greenery somewhere, sipping white wine from your Nalgene like God intended, just think how lucky we are to not take this kind of thing for granted.
Or, you know, whatever gets you through the day.
