by Seth Rogovoy

Disease-bearing bugs. Bacterial-laden water. Cancer-causing rays. Oppressive humidity. Need I say more?

Summer has always been my least favorite season. I just can’t stand hot weather. You can always add on layers if you’re cold, but there’s only so much stripping down you can do to cool off before there’s nothing left to strip. Is there a worse feeling than getting out of a shower and being unable to get dry because the air is wetter than you are?

Things are a little bit different these days, however. In the past, for the most part, one of my strategies for dealing with extremes of weather – cold or hot – was simply to avoid it. Too hot? Stay inside, preferably in an air-conditioned room if you have one (and I typically did have at least one – especially ever since the advent of computers gave me the excuse that my home office always had to have air-conditioning, if only for the sake of the machine and all my work it contained). Too cold? Stay inside a warm house, which fortunately I also usually had (most recently, I lived in a downtown apartment in Great Barrington, Mass., that had Manhattan-apartment-style heat, meaning a. you didn’t pay individually to heat your own apartment – the entire building was on one thermostat – and b. the way you regulated the heat was to open and close a window …. in January).

Now, however, things have changed. For one, I can no longer avoid going outside, typically several times a day, now that I live with two dogs that need twice-daily outings. Letting them run around in the fenced-in backyard won’t suffice. They need outings. If they don’t get them – sensory-laden walks in city or country that last ideally an hour, twice a day – they grow depressed, anxious, feisty, mischievous, or, in the case of Stevie, who at the age of one is still something of a puppy, insane. All winter long this means bundling up twice a day in many layers and boots and such, digging out if there’s snow, and bundling up the dogs, too. All summer long this means venturing out even if it’s 95 degrees and the dew point is 75 and the air quality is dangerous and there is no shade and there isn’t a proper way to dress that can both shield you from the sun while allowing your skin to breathe. Tough luck. The dogs need walking.

Also, the 160-year-old house I live in these days lacks insulation as well as a decent HVAC system, so it can get pretty broiling on hot summer days, even with a few window air conditioners. And parts of the house are so drafty that it can feel like you’re outside in the winter when you pass through them.

So at this late date, I can’t really avoid the extremes of weather the way I used to. This past winter, which wasn’t even that bad, other than that it never seemed to end, was the first one of my life that I really resented. I can’t control my indoor environment the way I did in the past (although I’m working on that; more on that some other time), and even if I could, I still have to venture out into the heartless natural world and subject myself to whatever indignities it has prepared for me.

Nature inflicted upon me one of its nastier indignities recently in the form of a tick-borne infection that caused my arm to turn red and itchy, swell to twice its size, and riddled me with Lyme disease-like symptoms – headaches, joint pain, mental confusion (insert jokes about my usual mental state here), nausea, and an inordinate fear of an Iranian nuclear attack on my hometown of Hudson, N.Y. As one old friend commented, this would have never happened in my previous life. “You mean you went out?”, she said.

So yes, I go out, winter, spring, summer, fall. Rain or shine. Snow or sauna. I get out. I walk. I get exercise. I breathe. I look. I think. I talk to my dogs. I talk to M. I think. I perambulate. I expend calories. I lose weight. I wear out shoes. I see things I never saw before (do you have any idea how many dead animals there are in the world lying around on the ground?). I walk.

And I still hate summer.