Michigan Summer

In Michigan, summer is a good thing. Sure, it gets hot here, terribly hot and all sorts of humid, but it's not the type of hot or humid that makes you plan your life around it. About a month ago, a friend who lives in Austin told me she waited until summer to go to movies because escaping the heat in the delightful cool of a theater there is necessary. That's not so here. In fact, going to the theater during the summer in Michigan is sort of sacrilegious. We don't waste sun here. It is a precious commodity, a rare and infrequent gift. Summer here is quite manageable and lovely and good.

Today, I woke up, made some scrambled eggs for a bunch of little boys roaming my parents' house, then took a run down a deeply wooded trail. It was a nice run with the requisite buzzing of giant dragonflies. I nearly stepped on a corn snake winding its way in front of me on the path. I think it was a corn snake anyway. I'm not sure, but anyway, it was the size of a corn snake, which is to say it was fairly small but fast. It's a great running path with all sorts of trunks to hop over and branches to maneuver beneath. I get my G.I. Jane out on this path.

After that, it was off to the craft store to buy materials to make coozies, and then of course, there was the coozie making with my nieces and nephews. Coozies scream of tubing down a lazy river, which is quintessential Michigan.

A nice walk to Target followed by a walk through a human maze topped off the afternoon and then it was back home to a pool and a deck full of sunshine. That human maze, by the way, was a cool thing only there were no wrong moves to make. I cheated after a couple of minutes because a labyrinth - that's what they called it - a labyrinth and not a maze should have multiple paths and many decisions to make. This did not, which really makes it just a path. Anyway, it was still a cool thing. My nephews and niece sweated their way through a dead tear run of the thing and then they sat in the center of it in the direct and open sunshine.