We really do have summer in NH. Sometimes. Well, for about 3 months each year. But in those three months it can get downright hot here, and with the nearby ocean you also get hyper-humid air, which mixes nicely with the often 90 degrees + temps to cook us like lobstahs. This is why getting a spot on the Hampton beaches during those months is as iffy as cell phone coverage in NH. This year June was extremely rainy and New Hampshirites went around complaining they had fungus growing in their armpits, but then came July and the killer heat. The fungus went away, but so did about two-thirds of our bodies' water mass. A surprisingly large proportion of New Hampshirites still have an English ancestry, so what you got here in July and August was a bunch of embarrassingly pasty-white, sweaty and dehydrated -- and irate -- Yankees.
But alas, those days are behind us and we can go back to our tweads and wool sweaters. We have entered that season in New Hampshire known as "non-summer". There are two other seasons, spring and autumn, but those both last about twenty minutes each. Sometime after August, you'll just hear a popping noise outside and if you're quick enough to run to a nearby window, you'll see the trees have all changed colors and dropped their leaves in one dramatic gesture. It's very pretty, but you have to be quick. Once the leaves have hit the ground, the scenery changes from stunning reds, oranges and yellows to a sort of brown-gray hybrid. That's the official color of non-summer, a dull non-ending streak of of brown-gray that uniformly wraps the landscape with the exception of the many evergreen trees, but even they try their best to blend into the scenery, at least as we get closer to Christmas.
Anyway, we have entered that part of the year -- lasting some eight months, give or take -- called non-summer here in New Hampshire but non-summer has a surprise it likes to spring on you. (No pun intended there.) Non-summer is allowed, just about any time it wants, from its inception in September until May, to suddenly and inexplicably dump lots of white stuff on us. That's right, non-summer is snow season, and it is going to make that point again this week -- just before Halloween -- when even here in southern NH, we're expecting 2-4 inches. This time non-summer has been nice enough to give us a little heads up (via the local news, WMUR), which provokes a mad rush to get porch plants and garden hoses indoors, but there have been a few times when we were caught off guard, with unpleasant consequences. That mad scramble is upon us now, so if you'll excuse me, I have to go find the car window scrapers in the basement.
