Summertime, or Restoring the Balance of the Universe

I believe it is a universal truth that a turn for the good must be accompanied by an equivalent turn for the worse, that when you anticipate something good, by the time you get there you’ll find that you’re really no better off than you were before. The most common example of this among LDS people, young and old, is marriage (but no, this post is not about marriage). “Your problems don’t end with marriage,” the married folk tell the single folk. “They only just begin.” Or, “If you’re not happy single, you won’t be happy married.” The same goes with just about everything else. We are warned not to constantly expect that we will finally be happy when—when we graduate, get that new job, move to a bigger house, have children, send our children away to college, or any number of life changing events. The truth is, each of these things brings about its own trials and tribulations to replace the trials and tribulations we left behind. That’s just the way of this world.

That seems like a depressing truth sometimes, but it is only depressing if you focus on the second half, the part about the accompanying turn for the worse. It’s depressing to think that once you get married, you’re going to be attached to another person with his or her own agency for the rest of your life (or the rest of eternity) and that you’ll get annoyed with them just as easily as you get annoyed with anyone else you spend a lot of time with, that once you have that bigger house you’re also going to have bigger house payments and a lot more cleaning and upkeep, that once you move to that new location you’re going to discover that the weather is better but the traffic is worse, that once you have children they’re still going to grow into teenagers.

But the truth of the matter is that the first half is equally important. There may be some turn for the worse, but it’s still accompanying a turn for the better, and if you’ve been smart about your decision chances are pretty good that the turn for the worse is mild in comparison with the turn for the better. Marriage is hard, but most people I know agree that it is still better than being single. Children will cost you sleep and peace of mind for the rest of your life, but (I’ve heard) they also bring love and joy that are unmatched by anything else. The balance of the universe goes in both directions. In fact, the second law of thermodynamics notwithstanding, I suspect that some balance is lost on the side of the better.

My point of this lengthy introduction is not to be profound, but rather to make sure everyone, especially my parents, knows that what I’m about to say does not in any way detract from my firm belief in the superiority of summer over winter (or even spring and fall). Summer versus winter is just like married versus single, only more so, because there are a lot more good things about being single than there are good things about winter.

But this morning as I stepped outside for my Sunday morning walk, in shorts and a t-shirt and flip-flops, with the sun shining and the grass freshly mown and a weather forecast of eighty-something degrees, I finally remembered that even summertime cannot escape the universal need for balance. I have been waiting for months and months and months to be able to step outside and feel warm, hot even, at any time of day, to wear short sleeves, expose my knees, get a flip-flop tan on my feet and a sunburn on my arms, but this all comes at a price. Because I have developed a great affection for the summertime, I have also been cursed with two summertime afflictions. Not everyone has. This may be because not everyone loves the summertime and hates the wintertime as passionately as I do. In order to maintain the universal balance it seems that in order to enjoy the sunshine, I also have to put up with a miserable grass allergy and an unusual ability to attract mosquitoes.

Lots of people have allergies—about fifty percent of the population is allergic to one of the ten most common allergens (including ragweed, dust mites, cockroaches, peanuts, and yes, grass). Seasonal allergies or hay fever afflict anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the population. And the proportion of the population with allergies is increasing. (Interesting side note: Allergies are worse in the cities than in the country, strangely enough. This is because city planners tend to use male plants in the landscaping because male plants are less messy than female plants. This means that there is an overabundance of pollen from the male plants with no female plants to go to. Hence the pollen has nothing better to do than to lodge itself in the nose and lungs of poor allergy sufferers and make them miserable during the plants’ reproductive season.) But of those seasonal allergies grass is about the only one that coincides exactly with the beginning of summer weather—everything else happens earlier in the season, or, in the case of dust mites, molds and (I imagine) cockroaches, in the wintertime when people spend their days indoors without ventilation. I do absolutely fine in the wintertime when the temperatures are disagreeable and in the springtime when the temperatures are still inconsistent. Grass allergies hit right when things are finally getting good.

Incidentally, I consider the discovery that I have a grass allergy to be one of the triumphs of my existence. Most people who suffer from hay fever have no idea what they are allergic to and I feel quite proud of the fact that I can say with confidence that it’s grass that does it to me. I first suspected that this was the case several years ago when on a beautiful day in Provo I decided to study on a patch of grass by the JSB. After half an hour I was red-eyed, itching, and sneezing, and I thought, ah-ha, I am allergic to grass. It made sense. My grandma lives in Bountiful just a few houses away from a large grassy hill, and when I was young and my family would visit my grandparents in the summertime (probably in June, which is right during the peak of grass allergy season) we would often walk down the street to play on the hill. My brothers and I loved rolling down the hill, but I remember that after a few rolls down I would begin itching almost unbearably, and that the itching wouldn’t go away for the rest of the evening. At the time I thought this happened to everyone and you just put up with it.

Once I got it into my head that I might be allergic to grass I began paying attention. All the empirical evidence seemed to suggest that grass was the culprit—my allergies flared when I spent long periods of time on the lawn or playing ultimate Frisbee in a grassy park, and were worst when I actually sat on it (during grass pollen season, that is), and weren’t quite as bad if I avoided grass (very hard to do in the springtime when any normal person’s instinct on seeing a patch of green is to remove her shoes and walk across it barefoot). And when I discovered weather.com’s allergy tracker, the grass pollen levels in Provo corresponded almost exactly with the severity of my allergies. (Just to make sure, I also checked the weed and tree pollen levels and found very little if any correlation). The same is holding true for Ann Arbor. Plenty of people have been suffering from allergies for the last month but grass pollen levels have been at low that entire time and I’ve been fine. Today was the first day grass pollen was listed as moderate, and it was also the first day I’ve experienced any of the symptoms. I feel validated.

And then there are the mosquitoes. I attract mosquitoes more than any person I know, and though I may sometimes exaggerate just a little on my blog for the sake of making a point, I promise that this is not an exaggeration. Way back when I was twelve I went to Girls Camp for the first time, and along with a great deal of other calamities (ranging from burnt Dutch oven cornbread that looked fine until you tasted it, to an earthquake in the middle of the night), I spent the week acquiring more mosquito bites than anyone else in the camp. I was religious in using Off and Skin-So-Soft (which doesn’t really work, even for normal people), but I may as well have been slathering myself with honey. During testimony meeting on the last day in camp I was in such agony that I broke down crying and had to be led by one of the leaders to a nearby tent to be covered in anti-itch cream (which also doesn’t work).

I have lots of other fun mosquito memories. Like the time I stood outside on the curb by my car, in flip-flops, talking with my soon-to-be-roommate in Virginia for ten minutes, max, and returned home and counted twenty five (really!) brand new mosquito bites on my feet and ankles alone. Or when I first moved into the House-on-Stilts in Provo, which has no screens on any of the windows and no air conditioning. I moved in during August, and for the first several weeks I had new mosquito bites for almost every hour of the day that I spent in my house. My roommates, oddly enough, did not share this problem.

Yesterday was gorgeous, the warmest day we’ve had yet. It was also the day I got my first mosquito bite. This morning on my twenty-minute walk I got several more, and had to knock off a mosquito that was dangling greedily from my forearm before I went back inside my apartment.

But I am not regretting that summer has come. Not at all. As I said way back at the beginning, it all comes down to how you look at things. I can dwell on the mosquito bites and the allergies (and as grass pollen fills the air I am sure I will have plenty of opportunity to do that), or I can think, “Well, at least the allergy and mosquito seasons are accompanied by such wonderful weather!” And really, allergies and mosquitoes are such minor afflictions in the scheme of things…