My wife is lamenting that Ashlandia has become a dancing desert. There are no venues that we know to go dancing. When we want to dance, we need to head out of town to wineries, breweries, or up into a resort called Lake of the Woods. That last is where we usually wind up.
Which pushed me to think, do young people still dance? I went onto TikTok for the answer. Instead, they have videos the young have made of their parents showing their dance moves — or videos made by boomers showing their moves.
It’s Sunday, July 23, 2023. July is eyeing the calendar, getting ready to clock out for another year. Many say that being a month is a good gig. You only work 28 to 31 days, depending on which month you draw. But July tells me it was hard being July this year, hot and disastrous almost 24/7. “Never a let up.” She pursed her lips. “I will not miss it.”
It’s ten till a cup of coffee and 71 degrees F with smoke in Ashlandia, where beauty is everywhere and the beer flows by the pint. The high today is 94 F, and the smoke still comes from the Flat fire to our west. The Lake of the Woods outing yesterday was fab entertaining. Good friends, tasty food, lots of dancing to a wonderful band called Saucy, and pleasant fresh air that cooled as the horizon slipped over the sun. Saucy advertised themselves as a party dance band that covers songs from the eighties and nineties, but they put some sixties in there and music from the seventies and aughts.
After a couple hours of dancing, shouldn’t be surprising that The Neurons posted “And We Danced” by The Hooters from 1985 in the morning mental music stream (trademark complicated). See, it’s about dancing, yeah? Yeah. That explains it all. Song stayed there despite a barrage of dreams,
Time to get on hoping, coping, striving, trying, crying, thriving, pushing, pulling, eating, sleeping, loving, living, and all the accoutrements of going through another day. Stay strong, be pos. Here’s the music. Let’s go. Cheers
July 22, 2023. It’s a warm, quiet Saturday morning in Ashlandia, where the trees are old and so are most of the people. 71 F with smoke — a light haze, really — nature is pressing on the pedal and taking us up to 95 F. That’s where she likes cruising in our life zone these days.
The thing about our weather is that it’s a slow build. Sweetly pleasant in the morning, it gets warm but not uncomfortable. People go outside and exclaim how nice it is. Stays like that, gently skipping through the low 80s. Then, around 3 PM, BAM. You hear a noise and look at one another. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sounded like it was outside.”
“We’d better go look.”
So we leave our cool enclosure and walk out and then, say to each other as we fan our faces, “Oh my god, it’s so hot out.”
The cats then shift into deeper shadow. Papi and Tucker, who normally stay away from one another, make a treaty and settle in shade on the porch, riding out the heat until the evening, when hostilities re-commence. The heat stays in the air until after nine on these nights, then scales down into the high seventies by ten. Windows and doors are opened to receive the cool night air. Sleep, rise, repeat.
We’re heading to Lake of the Woods Resort. Less than an hour from us up in the low mountains, the small lake is comforted by tall, old trees. Doesn’t get nearly as hot, and the lake breezes are muy refreshing. A band will be playing and BBQ will be underway. They’ll be dancing and socializing like it’s 1988, as the band, Saucy, covers songs from that area. Should be a good time. I’m excited about going.
Perhaps because of the heat, I have a Lover Boy song from 1983, “Hot Girls in Love” in the morning mental music stream (trademark dismissed). I can only guess the hot weather is why The Neurons slipped into the MMMS. Other guesses are welcomed.
Remain positive, stay calm, and keep on keeping on. The coffee has been injected, I mean, sipped. I feel my energy rising. Keep it real. Hey, ho, let’s go. Here’s the tune.
You feel it in the air and see it in the trees. That official arbiter, the calendar, claims its summer in Ashland. We in the real world know that autumn has supplanted summer. Whether summer grows aware of this and attempts to heat-blast us one last time, we will see. Weather forecasters present claim we won’t see a high temperature above seventy-nine degrees until September 26. Forecasting temperatures that far out isn’t historically successful.
We feel it, though, as I started out this thing saying. We all feel the air difference and state, “It feels like fall.” Accepting that as the de facto situation, we went out to celebrate summer’s end last night. Lake of the Woods Resort was the location. Colonel Mustard provided the music on the lakeside.
We visited a friend’s cabin for a start. The Civilian Conservation Corps built a few hundred cabins in the thirties and forties. Our friends bought one in two thousand one. It’s beautifully rustic, with minimal updates and upgrades. Everything done to it was completed with a mindset of keeping it resembling its origins. No running water, they have an outdoor shower under the deck and a two-hole outhouse. A small propane furnace was added, so they have some heat to drive out the mountain’s cold.
They provided us a boat-tour of the lake, and then ferried us to the resort. Colonel Mustard were already into their Beatles medley by then, so it was easy to jump up there and dance. Drinks, dining – with an excellent, freshly made mixed-berry cobbler, made and served in an iron fry pan, and topped with three scoops of vanilla ice cream, for dessert – and more dancing followed. The fun, social evening was a wonderful means to say good-bye to summer, and hello to autumn.
Michael Seidel, writer 