I know that when I last wrote I said that summer was on the wane, but it’s looking like Mother Nature forgot to pencil that in on her calendar. After a largely unremarkable June and July, during which we had a goodly portion of rain and temperature mostly topping out at the high teens Celsius (mid-sixties F), I figured that was as good as we were likely to get (though, truth be told, that was good enough for me; I’m no fan of the heat and we did get a good bit of sunshine). The last couple of days before my mom went were sunny and warm-ish, but there was a definite nip in the air telling us that fall was soon on its way.

A little over a week ago, however, all of that changed and we’ve had a long stretch of cloudless blue skies and HOT temperatures. For each of the past nine or ten days the mercury has risen to at least 25° C (77° F), with some days getting even hotter. Now that may not seem like much to many of you, but believe me when I say that it’s very warm up here in northern Sweden, even at high summer, and for late August it’s nearly unheard of. Not only that, but there has been no hint of an autumn chill in the air and we’ve seen nary a drop of rain for going on two weeks.

Yesterday Petra had a soccer game in a town about a half-hour north of here, and those poor girls were positively roasting. They had a large bucket of cold water on the sidelines and they took turns dipping sponges in it and mopping themselves down when they weren’t out on the field. Their usual energy was very obviously sapped by the heat and by the looks on their faces, none of them was enjoying herself too much. After Petra and I came home, we loaded everybody in the car and drove out to the beach, where the kids spent a good two hours just lounging around in the water.

Today I offered to let Yrsa take her bath in the tub out on the porch, but she immediately declined what is usually a great treat with the explanation that the sun was just too hot. Poor Olof, who’s in the middle of dismantling said porch so that we can have the drainage re-done on the house later this fall, can manage only short periods of time working out in the direct sun before he’s totally exhausted.

It’s really too bad that none of this happened during the actual summer, when everybody was on vacation, but you take what you can get. At least, when it does come along, we won’t spend the autumn bemoaning our lack of real summer.