Summer Blues, or When Does School Start?

Dear Reader,
It is the middle of summer. Utah summer heat has finally arrived in full force. The petunias in my window box took a hit when I was a few days slow in realizing how hot it really was getting. I'm not sure if they will recover... and that's a shame, too, because they were just starting to catch on. Other than the petunias, I haven't done much planting this year. I don't even have a garden. Perhaps the zucchini was more traumatic than I realized. I still have frozen zucchini in my freezer. I tell myself there will always be next year and I try not to feel guilty. My children are settling comfortably into a constant snacking regimen. They're in and out all day, leaving the doors wide open behind them. In the afternoons, when it is too hot to go out, they have their obligatory movie, and I take my nap.

Sophie is devoting all her time to sunbathing on the bench in our front window. There is a cat that lives across the street that has taken to tormenting her in weeks past. But the cat must be seeking cooler spots away from Sophie's gaze, or Sophie is just too hot and lazy to care lately. Our afternoon is punctuated occasionally by the clunk of Sophie flopping onto the hardwood floor of our parlor when she's become too warm to endure the window any longer. She's far too lazy these days to take the trouble to make it to her cushion in the living room. She pants on the floor, grinning to let her tongue hang out until she's cool enough to climb back into her sentinel spot at the window.

Somehow I have fallen out of my reading habit, I haven't been really reading a book for weeks... oh, I've dabbled consistently. But there hasn't been anything for weeks that has really grabbed me. I find myself surfing on the internet, shopping or looking at recipes, or watching English period films. But at the end of the day, there is nothing to show for it all, and I am afraid I am just getting lazy.

It is the third week of July, and at the low of our summer. When school starts I will miss these empty, lazy days. It will get cold and dark, and I will miss sweating in the heat and sun, visiting with our neighbors across the rose bushes, and the constant in and out of barefoot children. But for now I am in the grips of ennui. How frustrating... how disappointing! How utterly unacceptable! I need a good book.