Summer's here ... Time to bundle up

"The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco."

This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain (although it seems it has yet to be verified). At any rate, it's an apt assessment of the summers in San Francisco.

The last few mornings and evenings have been blanketed by a thick, eerie fog. It's so thick that you can see it creeping its way ever so gradually east from the ocean across the city.

Having spent most of my summers in the hot, humid, mosquito-thriving climate of the Midwest, I nearly froze my ass off last summer after having moved to San Francisco in the winter. It's not that the temperature totally drops. The air gets so damp with the fog that it seeps in and chills you to the bone. It's so damp that when you walk under a tree it feels like rain because the moisture falls in droplets from the leaves.

The fog-filled mornings and evenings require dressing in layers -- a sweater or long-sleeved shirt with a jacket over a T-shirt. If it's windy as well, a neck scarf can be a good idea. In the afternoons, especially downtown, you have to strip off the layers so you don't get overheated and sweat profusely as you walk from place to place, or run to catch your bus or train.

Sometimes in the evenings I dig out my leather gloves, which my fiancé makes fun of and says, "You don't need those. It's not that cold!" Screw that, I'm keeping my hands warm.

When I was a kid, I used to stay outside playing in the snow all winter long. I could while away hours building snow forts and snow houses out of the drifts in my yard. Fresh, untouched snow of course required plopping down to make a snow angel. Or, I'd walk to the local outdoor skating rink that was just a block away, and pretend I was an Olympic figure skater or speed skater. When I finally came inside, I'd have these round, rough pink patches on my cheeks from the cold, and my fingers and toes would drive me insane from the itchiness as they thawed from their nearly frostbitten state.

Nowadays, I'm such a wimp. I turn on my electric heating blanket before I go to bed at night, even in the summer, especially in the summer. Otherwise, I wake up freezing in the middle of the night at 2:00 a.m.

I miss the change of seasons in the Midwest. After the hot, humid summers, you appreciate the colder temperatures of the fall and winter. (Although, I don't miss the -20° windchill.) Then toward the end of winter's deep freeze, you look forward to the spring thaw and the heat of the summer.

A friend once mentioned how recalling when certain events happened can be difficult while living in San Francisco because you often can't relate them to a particular season. It's true. You can't relate that one outing to the hottest day of the summer, or that day spent with family and friends when the snowstorm hit. (The best days of winter in the Midwest are the snow days, when a snowstorm or severe weather shuts down schools and businesses. There's no greater joy, I tell you, than discovering you don't have to go to school or work.)

I do, however, remember one afternoon last summer. My fiancé and I had gone to Ocean Beach on an unusually warm day to lay out and get some sun. The day at the ocean was amazing to me, having grown up with only lakes nearby in the Midwest. But around 3:00 p.m., the fog suddenly rolled in. We, along with the other beach goers, quickly pack up our gear and donned some warmer clothes.

Ahh, summer in San Francisco!