And the Switch Has Been Flipped

Those of us in Pennsylvania really notice dramatic weather changes twice per year.  Once is in the Fall when the big yellow buses begin making their rounds.  It is pretty consistently much chillier and less humid from that time, usually just after Labor Day.  To me that brings the exhilaration of football and I associate those days with precious times with my father watching Penn State win and lose....but mostly win!

The other time of the year when you can just know the weather will make a marked change is just around or after Memorial Day.  In this case the heat, humidity and summer weather begins.  It is when the pools open for the season, picnics mark the beginning of the outdoor season and for regular people flip flops come out of the closet.  I am not regular people.  I would wear my flip flops year round if it weren't for the risk of frostbite therefore my feet come out to play well before Memorial Day.

Well, this year is no exception to this rule.  We experienced noticeable chilly weather last week.  This week we are hanging out around the 90's.  Thunderstorms are a daily possibility.  That switch has flipped and summer weather is here.

I love seeing the farmers across the street make hay.  It is a process.  That of the cutting, drying, turning, checking and finally baling.  Takes me back to my childhood when my very best friend lived on a farm and we helped them bring in hay one very hot summer day.  I loved it soooo much!  Memories of that day and others where I got to enjoy visiting their farm.  Talking to the very cows who gave us their milk, giggling at the antics of the pigs and piglets, daring myself to challenge hens for their eggs and other such things that my friend just took for granted.

Perhaps that is why my heart is so given over to Lancaster County in my adulthood.  I truly love living around farms, cows, fields full of crops and hard working practical people.  There is little more beautiful than the grouping of buildings that make up a farm.  The barn, perhaps being the most obvious but there is almost always corn storage, multiple small out buildings and one or more houses. The other evening we were over at Rockvale Outlets and I looked across the road just before dusk and noticed one of these very common sights but with a deep blue sky with fluffy white clouds above it.  I stopped to just take it in.  I considered snapping a photo but knew that the lighting was too far gone to do it justice.  I couldn't bear to look at it less than as it was in real life.  Sometimes you just have to take a minute.  Out from behind a lens to just soak up the beauty.  To let your mind wander back to special times and friends who are now on the periphery of your life.  Not because anything is wrong....just because we no longer live in the same neighborhood and we have grown into other lives.
And so here we are.  Beginning the days of summer that will both go quickly and cause us to groan every now and then at the extremes of temperature and humidity.

Because the switch was flipped.....yesterday.