Summer seemed to creep up gradually. It seemed like one day I was still wearing my heavy jacket and jeans complaining about the fog, rain and cold and than one day, all of a sudden, the layers came off, I got a sunburn, the water warmed up, the lifeguards showed up at the beach and it was officially summer!
One of the first real summer things I do every July is head out to Rendell's Farm in Bras d'Or and pick enough fresh strawberries to last the winter. This year the strawberries weren't as good as they usually were and my schedule didn't work out very well with the sunny days (it rained every weekend at the start of summer) so I only got half of what I usually pick. As I write this, they are almost gone already!
Something that was missing at the beach this summer was fox kittens. There were none. Several adult foxes were hanging around the beach all summer, but no little ones were born.
Most mornings before heading to the beach, I'd drive to Dad's and go biking along the shore to the lighthouse. That was sometimes followed by a visit to my sisters to see her and my little nephew or we would meet them at the beach so he could play in the sand and out his feet in the water.
As summer went on, the days got hotter and, unfortunately for me, my air conditioning broke in my car. Of course, right in the middle of summer! After a hard time trying to get someone to fox it and honor the warranty, it was back up and running but I was having to roll down the windows and sweat out any long drives for almost a month.
Those hot days lingered and there were no more rainy weekends come late July. As good as this sounds, it wasn't good for our forests. Huge fires broke out elsewhere in the province and there was a high risk of one starting here so the province shut down the woods. No fires, no hiking, no doing anything if it involved walking through any woods. That smoke from the wildfires up the line drifted this way a few times and one evening, I captured the perfect sunset behind a haze.
