Friday Five: Word Association

Playing Late, because Other Stuff (tm) happened this weekend...

This post is loosely based on previous "wordy" Friday Fives from Reverend Mother and Songbird. I liked the results, and so we are doing another word association. Theirs were based on words from a lectionary text. Mine comes from the Lovin' Spoonful song, "Summer in the City."

Think summer......are you there? Below you will find five words or phrases. Tell us the first thing you think of on reading each one. Your response might be simply another word, or it might be a sentence, a poem, a memory, a recipe, or a story. You get the idea:

1. rooftop
2. gritty
3. hot town (yeah, I know, it's two words)
4. night
5. dance

Welll.... I'm not quite "at" summer yet, though Lord knows Northern Virginia has been of late. Back toward the tail end of May we began getting summer weather long before normal, and it got... Virginia-ish. Hot humid afternoons; thunderstorms darn' near every day... that heavy, high-temp, icky sort of weather that just wears you right down to a frazzle. All the severe weather warnings had an extra codicil: "because residents of the region have not yet had time to become accustomed to this sort of weather, temperature-related illness is expected..." or words to that effect.

Umm... yeah... *wry smile*

So here's my words:

1) Rooftop: First thing I thought of was a sight that made me smile recently: I was driving home and passed through the nearest large town, quite an old area, where the houses are now a little closer to the road than they were before the highway department stepped in, if you catch my drift. I saw a young woman sitting outside a dormer window on the roof of her home; she had on her bathing suit and sunglasses, and had a laptop in, well, her lap. :) I smiled at the novel concept of catching rays AND catching peace and quiet... then had a flashback to when I was much younger. I was at a church picnic, and took my plate of BBQ out onto the deck to soak up some sun while I ate. Stretched out on a chaise... put the plate in my lap... and ended up with a sunburn over most of my thighs... except for the half-circle on each thigh, from where the plate had been and protected my VERY pale Irish/German skin from the sun. :)

2) Gritty: The way my mucking boots feel when I balance on one foot, putting the other on the ground, when donning said boots... and inevitably sand gets on my sock, then into the boots. Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch... Once a horse steps on you, though, you tend to forget the grit.

3. hot town: Umm... pretty much everywhere lately. And people wonder why Summer is fourth on my list of favourite seasons... ;)

4) Night: Night, in Virginia during the summer, tends at its best to be when the temperature drops, the dew point rises, and I can shut off the AC--until July, that is, at which point it becomes the time when I can turn DOWN the AC. But on average... night is when I can think, dream, and weep without anyone seeing me. It is that space where I meet my Lord face to face without pretense and (for the most part) interruption. I like Night, most of the time...

5) Dance: I don't dance well, and when I do I tend to want to lead--oh, the unlooked-for ramifications of growing up as a Civil War Re-enactor, where I dressed as a boy. :) I was taught to dance from the "male position" and don't seem able to make the shift--but I can still waltz a girl in a hoopskirt with precision and éclat! I can even reverse her so the hoop does that scandalous, daring flip thing occasionally mentioned in well-researched historical romance novels... it's the sort of thing Rhett Butler would have done. *grin* I do like dancing, and wish most of all that I could swing dance--and that I had someone to share that with.

So that's Sharon's brain today, I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately--I'll post my sermon soon.