I am really having a hard time with the seasons this year. If you ask the husband, he will tell you that "Janet's favorite season is the one she's not in," which is sort of true, but this year it's especially bad because Mother Nature seems to have lost her Dayplanner.

I like the changing seasons. I like looking forward to summer, and then I get tired of it and fall is a welcome relief. I like winter because I have lots more knitting time. I like spring because it's full of the anticipation of getting the garden in. This year we didn't get spring, and we're not getting a whole lot of summer, either, and I am totally discombobulated.

Going to the Sun Road in Glacier Park opens for the first time today—today, July 13!—making it the latest opening in history. There is still snow on the mountains. That hasn't happened in the entire 18 years we've lived here. The peas in my garden are just now putting up blossoms—peas are a springtime crop, not a mid-summer one. We'll be lucky to get zucchini this year. Tomatoes? Don't make me laugh.

I feel cheated. I know that we have, possibly, about two more weeks of warm weather and then things will start winding down to cold again. Oh, we may have some nice Indian summer days well into September, but it won't be warm enough to ripen the tomatoes. It'll be too cold in the evenings to sit on the porch. A little bit of summer is almost worse than no summer at all.

The other piece of this that's bothering me is my lack of productivity. There are 3 other people in this house who aren't usually here during the colder months. They make messes and don't clean up after themselves, and I spend an inordinate amount of my time in drill sergeant mode reminding my older daughter that the pan in which she cooks her eggs won't clean itself. I hesitate even to start working on something because someone will invariably come stand in my office door and ask me if I've seen their phone charger/recipe for whole wheat pizza crust/blue camisole with lace trim, or ask "do we have any lemon juice and cucumbers?" (I don't want to know), or inform me that they need to be somewhere at 5:30 p.m. and by the way, could we pick up so-and-so on the way? Arrggghhh. It's almost as bad as when they were toddlers and I would spend all day puttering and looking busy because if I sat down, the kids would assume I had nothing to do. I even asked my older daughter the other day if she had once seen me sit down from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed. She thought for a moment and said, "No."

So every morning I get up and fight with myself for a few moments. I am trying not to hurry time. I am trying to enjoy the sunshine because I will miss it in January. I am trying to lower my expectations for productivity. But I can't help it—there is part of me that will rejoice when September gets here again.