I took a long walk this morning. I had to. Literally had to. The temperature outside was in the mid seventies and there was a deliciously cool breeze blowing through the trees. We haven’t had this kind of weather in months. If I hadn’t taken a walk after I finished listening to our favorite Sunday morning radio shows, I believe I would have collapsed into an ever-shrinking ball of regret.

All summer long – since the end of May, if memory serves – we’ve lived in a sort of reverse-winter: It was so hot that going outside was not an option. In summers past when we came home from work we could throw open all the windows or, in the dog days of August, head straight for the thermostat to crank up the air conditioning, but this year the airco’s been on pretty much all the time. We’ve even been sleeping with it on. We’ve never done that before, but turning it off meant waking up in the middle of the night tangled in sheets soaked with our own sweat. A couple nights of that and we didn’t care how much it cost to keep the airco running.

Last night, though, a storm front blew through the area that cooled everything off so thoroughly that we switched off the air conditioning after dinner, threw open all the windows and enjoyed the feeling of fresh air blowing through the house for the first time in months. And it only got cooler as the night went on. Sleeping with the windows cracked all night was bliss!

As I listened to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and then Says You this morning, I felt a persistent itch to get out of the house and realized I had cabin fever. I had to finish listening, though. It just had to be done. But the minute Richard Sher finished up, I was pulling on a pair of sandals and heading out the door. I wandered south through the neighborhood until I ended up on Broadway, followed that street east until I got to the park where the farmer’s market was in full swing and stopped to buy myself a cookie. Really shouldn’t have been eating a cookie but it fit the mood.

Crossing Broadway I cut through the cemetery and into Edna Taylor Park, where I walked across the marsh, then around the pond before picking up the path through the woods to the Aldo Leopold Nature Center. I had a little stroll around the ponds there before crossing through the neighborhood between the nature center and Monona Drive as I headed home.

Took me about an hour and a half to finish my wander, get back home and start doing something productive, which is not what I wanted to do, but I had to. Literally. Those clothes don’t fold themselves.