Signs of Summer

A warning!! This is one of those tales that involves a lot of personal coincidences and vague acquaintanceships...try to keep up.

With this crappy weather of late, we've all been searching for conclusive proof tha summer is even intending to arrive this year. Yesterday, on the first day of the season, I got such proof.

This tale takes us back to last year, when Kira and I decided to go swimming at a remote spot on the Kennedy River (we later camped there on our honeymoon). While we were there, we ran into my bosses partner Kim, and a naked man with a dog. I was surprised to run into Kim, as I don't often run into her. The dog looked vaguely familiar. Kim was camping there with a friend (also female).

The next week, when we were in the office, Kim was telling the tale of the "naked guy", and how despite the fact that two uninterested females were camping there (having arrived first) this naked man persisted on being totally nude, all the time for 3 straight days. Granted it was hot last summer, but his immodesty seemed excessive.

In the coarse of this tale, it was revealed that the "naked guy" was actually a person named Steve, the roommate of my co-worker Dierdre. This made us laugh...ironic, right?

So yesterday, the first day of summer according to the western calendar (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), I was down at the river (a different river), skipping stones and throwing sticks for the dog. All of a sudden, I heard barking from a few hundred feet downstream. Curiosity aroused, I walked down for a vantage point, only too see a vaguely familiar naked man throwing sticks to a dog named Jasper. That's right..."naked guy" was out. Like the groundhog coming out of the hole, this is surely a time honoured marker of the passing seasons.

Oh...the photo up top is not related to any of this...it's simply a pleasant nature scene. I neither had a camera to take a picture of Steve in all his glorious nudeness, nor do I believe anyone would really want to see that. But bless that " naked guy" for heralding summer.