Thursday, July 21, 2011

Dog Days

Today feels like the summer before my third year of university.  I remember it being a crazy hot summer.  I was subletting at The Partington House with friends and working at Wendy's, riding my bike pretty much wherever I needed to go in Windsor.  I was 20, it was my first summer away from home, and I was enjoying myself like crazy.  It was the summer I discovered They Might Be Giants, and "I Can See Clearly Now" by Holly Cole was my personal anthem.

But it was hot!  So hot!  I'd finish my shift at Wendy's and some nights go over and sit in Tim Horton's because it was just too hot to go home right away.  Other nights I would bike home and sit on the front porch with my housemates, smoking, and talking in the dark because it was too hot to even put a porch light on.

There were news stories about cows dying in the fields.  I would watch the neighbourhood kids in their sprinklers and want to go join them.

When the weather finally broke, I was out on my bike with one of my housemates.  If memory serves, we were out looking at places to live for September.  The rain came down in sheets, and it was glorious, with great booming cracks of thunder and lightning you could see even though it was day time.   We rode home, whooping and laughing, and then went and danced in the street in the rain with the neighborhood kids.