This year is shaping up to be the hottest on record in more than a century. For some, the heat is the best part of summer. Sitting by a pool or enjoying a late meal in the backyard with friends makes the season more enjoyable.
I am a huge fan of summer. I love sitting outside with my pups as I enjoy a beverage, lovingly tending to my modest garden or just reading a book in a park. Being outdoors on a warm, sunny day always seems to brighten my mood and allows me to relax.
My husband, on the other hand, is not such a fan. As soon as the mercury rises above 20 C my husband turns from a fun-loving oversized kid into a cranky man-beast that will snap at the smallest of perceived transgressions.
He avoids all contact with the sun, instead spending hours hidden away as he becomes absorbed in the world of online gaming.
When I do manage to pry him away from his digital world to go for a walk or visit an outdoor market, it doesn’t take long for him to start complaining about how hot it is or get grumpy with me for some silly thing that would normally not illicit such a grumbling response.
None of this summertime behaviour surprises me anymore and I don’t take it too personally as I’ve learned the summer is my husband’s cantankerous season. I’m not much of a sunshine and rainbows kinda gal in the dead of winter, so I figure it’s only fair my hubby has his surly months too.
However, the impossible happened recently and I was finally able to coax him to join me in the backyard for a beer. This is the first year we’ve had our backyard set up with a garden and a patio set and I have been trying since the spring to get my husband to relax out back with me. He hesitantly agreed to join me and, after first changing into shorts and a T-shirt, stepped out into the sun with an icy cold beer in hand and took a seat.
All would have been lovely had he not decided his chair wasn’t quite in the right position and he pushed it back just a touch too far. The chair scraped across the concrete slab and sunk a good three inches into the mulchy dirt surrounding the basement window wells. As he began to sink his eyes lit up like a deer in headlights as confusion, fear and surprise all rained down on him. His arms flailed, trying to grab for anything to keep him upright as he fell backwards into the window well.
Missing the patio table with his arm, he kicked it with his foot as his feet rose up and off the ground, knocking over my beer. I jumped to upright the table and my husband just as he dropped his newly opened bottle of beer, smashing it and it’s lovely golden content onto the concrete.
His only saving grace from falling fully into the window well was my tomato plants, which I had so lovingly tended to since May. They suffered several broken branches.
I eventually returned the table, my beer and my husband to normalcy. He was a little sore but otherwise uninjured and we couldn’t help but laugh at his luck.
Needless to say, my backyard has yet to be revisited by my hubby as it is now too sunny, too hot and too much of a danger zone for him.
