August Moon 13

In honor of the blue moon on August 21, 2013, Kat McNally and Meredith Shadwill have created a series of eleven journaling prompts.

As Kat explains:

What is August Moon? As we transition into the last quarter of the year, we are inviting you to join us in responding to a series of prompts designed to bring you closer to all you wanted 2013 to be. We reckon that now is the time to ask: the universe will hear you.

 

For more about their project, check out this link, August Moon 13, and follow the hashtag #AugustMoon13 on Twitter and Instagram.

In the meantime, this post is my response to the following prompt:

From #augustmoon13 Kat writes: We are about to enter into a gentler season i.e. Autumn/Fall if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere.

For me, these seasons often feel like a relief after the intensity of Summer and Winter. How do you intend to transition into the new season?

Learning to Appreciate Bright Sun & Sharp Shadows

North Texas summers are intense. Here, the weather is not just a conversational cliché, but a force to be reckoned with. Even though I have an office job, I’m not tucked inside a climate controlled building all day, hiding from the summer heat. Manning the office at my husband’s boat repair shop means that I am often right out in it. (I say “manning the office” but I’m the only one with two X chromosomes in the place. I actually leave the toilet seat up out of politeness, y’know?)

My co-workers have it the worst. Even when workshop temperatures top 100 degrees, they must still crawl into even hotter boat bilges, sometimes while wearing heavy respirators and other gear. On the hottest days, the air-conditioner in my little office can only cool things down to the mid-90’s, but that still feels like a fridge in comparison to what my co-workers endure.

A couple summers ago, one of my co-workers passed out at lunch and woke up in the ER. Even though he’d been drinking lots of water, his electrolytes were out of balance and he got heat stroke.

Scary!

In summer, we keep a close eye on each other at the boat shop, watching for red splotchy faces, bloodshot eyes, glistening skin, trouble stringing a sentence together… It’s easier, somehow, to tell when someone else needs to take a break, stand in front of the a/c for a while, or just go home. One day, we were all pointing fingers at each other saying, “You look awful – go home!” We closed shop at 2 p.m. that day.

The heat amplifies everything; it makes trivial moments seem louder and more dramatic than they really are. It’s like having the volume turned up on a TV show you hate. Let’s call it, The Heat Show, and the narrator is a pompous, opinionated jerk called, Mr Heat. Mr Heat is impervious to all the misery he creates. In fact, he thinks we’re all a bunch of whiners because he, personally, has never sweat in his life.

Good for you, Mr Heat, good for you. I heard you the first 800 times. *eye roll*

 

I have acclimated a little in my 4 years here, but it’s still a challenge. Every time I step outside, I brace myself against the hot slap of the sun. I even carry washcloths in my purse to blot my face and neck with. (I’m worse than Meatloaf at the end of a concert, I tell ya!) Oh, and don’t get me started on my never-ending quest for a sunscreen that won’t make me break out. Gah!

That said, I have come to appreciate the sharp, bright shadows created by the intense sun here in Texas. As the self-appointed Boat Shop Artist in Residence, I enjoy composing photos that I simply wouldn’t see in cooler climes, such as the second one I added to this post.

As we slowly transition into the gentler season of fall, I appreciate how the exaggerations created by the summer’s bright sun and deep shadow point things out I might not have seen otherwise.

What about you? Are you looking forward to the turn of the seasons? How was your summer?