All Summer

Hi, Posse!  Well, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you know we’re celebrating Summer! (you fiends in the Southern half of this planet… I dunno … y’all are… different.. 😉

If I’d been writing last week instead of now this would’ve been a very different post.  Late May through the near-end of June we had SUMMA! with temperatures in the 90s, torrential rains, then drought, then highHIGH heat (again!)… it felt like a typical Midwestern August.  Then temperatures dropped – and it felt like Autumn because, let’s face it, we’d already had a perfectly good late August – in June.

And I was sad.  My lilies (all 129 of them) budded and bloomed – in June!  Normally they herald the beginning of the end of Summer, kinda like tomatoes do.  So… y’all see where I was going here?  All Summer in a Month that isn’t Summer, to paraphrase Mr Bradbury and his heartbreaking story.

But now?  We’re back to Summer.  With a vengeance.  Extreme heat, bright sunshine (the kind that burns the tops of your feet if you’re in sandals)… and, if we’re lucky, torrential rains at night that make the plants ( that you stupidly planted when you thought it would stay cool) VERY happy – because there is nothing a transplant likes more than rain.  You can hose ’til the sun comes up and …meh.  but a good soaking rain?  YEAH, Baby!  So.  We’re back to Summer.

I’ve been covered in dirt and ant bites and earwigs (moving 4’x10′ steel panels – all 15 of them – to clear the 3’x 35′ border along the side of the garage.  The first year, we planted corn.  Eh (every other farm around here grows sweet corn and does it very well – so… eh).  After that we planted sStuffs:  Old lumber.  Steel panels. Trash elms.  Trash (because yes – we got to be that ratchet.  sigh).  This past year or so I decided that the only way to cleanse the space of my previous misery was to (wait for it) cleanse the damb space!  so I’ve been working like a lima bean to get things done – and done right.  Hauling/hammering/more hauling/ ripping stuff out/ repeat…  I go out (showered and in full face because I’m a SAVAGE!), spray on the Hawaiian Tropic 50 and the SkinSoSoft, do backbreaking work, come back in, shower AGAIN! and then FINALLY put on perfume.

yeah, I know – I forgot a couple pieces. sigh

By that time, however, I’m too beat to really manage a heavy hitter and citrus cannot compete with the reapplication of HT50 and SSS (it’s Summer and I WILL NOT GO INSIDE! (unless I have to)..  what I’ve been reaching for, on the daily, is Maison Martin Margiela’s ‘Lazy Sunday Morning’ (which I always want to call Lazy Sunday Afternoon, probably because I have no idea how to have a Lazy Morning).  It’s described as a ‘skin scent’ which I never thought I’d like but it works beautifully in the extreme heat with vestiges of Other Stuff on your skin, giving it a feeling of being a part of you, rather than a separate scent (duh – hence ‘Skin Scent’) – that rooty orris powder actually warms rather than cools (which orris usually does on my skin) and provides the powderiness that Fragrantica references as ‘freshly laundered sheets’ -to which I would add ‘that have been dried in the sun’, which is about as far from the dreaded Laundry Musks as you can get, imo.  This oughtn’t to work for me – but it does.  I tried it at the Naperville Sephora (almost didn’t – MAYNE! but they do make it difficult to sample perfume – the Margielas are on the top shelf, affixed to the shelf by a really bitchy retractable cord and.. well…had I been a half-inch shorter and without my existing WNBA reach, I would’ve been SOL).  My first thought was…. wayminit!  Where have YOU been all my life?  I was poised to buy a bottle there and then but the spectre of Bathroom Yet to Come reared its head… so I got a sample from Surrender to Chance along with the green one that Cinnamon wrote about a bit ago, which started this whole Margiela Thing.  There’s something about LSMorning that almost forces you to relax a bit – it doesn’t have a shrieky bone in its body and it has no interest in bossing you around – it just sits, shimmering, on the skin, inviting you to take your coffee outside and sit your ass down for a minute and enjoy the lilies.  So I did.  And I did it again.  And again.  A gal could get to likin’ this way of being.

sidDOWN!

Have any of you tried Lazy Sunday Morning?  Do you think Martin Margiela would mind if I changed it to Lazy Sunday Afternoon?  I really don’t do ‘Lazy’ that early (I know – weird).  Tell me all about it and I’ll poke my raggedy fingernails(omg – such a mess, those nails!) for a winner for a sample!