It is summer time. The calendar says summer officially arrived on June 20, and there are some other clues the season has arrived:

I can drive from Sweetwater to Ball Play and get home before dark and even have enough daylight left to weed and water my flowers.

The weeds are growing up in my flowers because it is too hot to keep them under control and my flowers shrivel up if I forget to water them about every other day. Even one of my favorite heat-tolerant flowers, portulaca or moss rose, is not doing too well in this hot, dry weather very well.

The one good thing about the dry weather is we aren’t mowing every week. And thank goodness since it costs as much to gas up the mower as it used to cost to fill up the car.

My body has become a target for every little flying, stinging bug and poisonous plant. A few weeks ago I got into some chiggers while working in the yard, and we all know where they like to bite. It’s not very pleasant. For the longest time when I was growing up I thought chiggers were the delicate white flowers that every time I got near my grandmother would warn me to get away from. Of course I later learned that chiggers just like to live on Queen Anne’s Lace, when they are not busy nibbling on people.

Anyway, a couple of days after the chigger incident, I made the mistake of walking my dogs about dusk along a lake trail. The mosquitoes buzzed around my ears and feasted on my arms and legs. I looked like I had some horrible skin disease with all the red welts dotting my body. Now I have a patch of itchy poison oak on my leg.

I haven’t used my hair dryer in several weeks; it’s just too uncomfortable to blast my head with that hot air every morning. It wouldn’t do any good anyway; my hair will be one big ball of frizz by the end of the day.

The other night at 7 o’clock the thermometer on my back porch was still hovering around 100 degrees. A thermometer on the other side of the house said it was 86. Either way it was hot.

The fans in our house are running constantly and I don’t dare turn on the clothes dryer until the sun has gone down. Our house is not air conditioned, which oddly enough I don’t mind after sitting in a freezing office all day. We did finally install an attic fan (that we bought a couple of years ago and that sat in storage until this summer) and it has made a huge difference.

I don’t have to worry about rushing home and cooking supper. I get to relegate much of the cooking to my husband who is the master of the grill at our house. Or we eat a bowl of cereal or a sandwich because it’s too hot to cook.

Little villages of tents, boats and people playing spring up every weekend along the shores of Tellico Lake. However, I’ve noticed there doesn’t seem to be quite as many boats on the lake this summer. People probably can’t afford to fill up their boats for just a few hours of zipping around on the lake. I know my Jet Ski is still sitting in the barn where I parked it last fall.

Despite the heat and the bugs, I love summer. Even though we grownups don’t get a two-month summer vacation like when we were in school, there’s just something about the long, sunny days that seems to relax people. Have fun in the sun this summer!

mia.rhodarmer@advocateand democrat.com | 337-7101.