I got a sunburn the weekend before last. I’m pretty fair, so getting a sunburn isn’t surprising. I do my best to avoid it, but I’m not always successful. A missed patch of skin. Carelessness in the moment which comes back to bite me. I do know better, but I get caught out sometimes. My mom slathered me with SPF45 in the 1990s, a bit ahead of everyone wearing regular sunscreen, and higher than the suggested SPF15, and later 30. She insisted on us putting on sunscreen every summer day after breakfast. She sought out bottles on sale; one summer despite all of us being well past the baby stage, we wore SPF50 for babies, because the price was good. This later trained me to wear sunscreen every single day on my face, at minimum. I buy 50+ (and when we were acting like SPF110 was a thing we could buy, I bought that. My friends made fun of me, and on one canoe trip in August with my partner’s family, they teased me relentlessly the whole day. I was the only one who went home without a sunburn that day).
Despite this, however, I lost my head on the first gloriously warm and sunny weekend. It was 14 and not a cloud in the sky. The snow in the yard melted enough for me to move the recycling and garbage bins off the porch, and once that was done, I bounded back into my apartment, pulled my hammock chair out of storage, and parked myself on it with a drink and book, with sunglasses and ball cap. What I hadn’t done in my haste to go read outside for the first time in 2023, was to put sunscreen on my arms.
And I got burnt. I even got burnt on my ankles, where my pants didn’t quite meet my socks. It’s April and I already have a line on my wrist from where my bracelet was laying. I was brilliantly red on most of my right arm, and a sliver of left arm. The only saving grace was the fact I had my face sunscreen on, a hat, and sunglasses, for my poor photosensitive eyes. But I needed, positively craved that sunshine. Winter is very long here in this part of the world, and even a mild one, like this past one, has the effect of causing you to slowly lose your mind in the dark, cold, and gloom. It’s why snowbirds exist: after a lifetime of slogging through a painful Canadian winter, the reward is retiring and spending six months less a day in Florida, skipping winter entirely.
For those of us who aren’t yet living the snowbird life, we bound out into the first day of good weather, giddy with relief. Weather is delicate at this time of the year: a warm day can be followed by a snowstorm, or be a lone standout in weeks of grey, cold showers. However, once that first warm day appears, we know that we’ve conquered winter. It may have a few gasps left in it, trailing into May (there’s a reason why my winter tires are still on my car!). But spring is coming, and so is summer, the brightest, most joyous time of the year in my part of the world. We swap our wardrobes from parkas to shorts, and we fill the propane tanks of our dusty barbeques.
It was anticipation for these moments which had me bound outside, not caring about the potential for sunburn. I wanted to absorb as much sunshine as I could, and I wanted to welcome the return of my favourite warmer season past time, reading on my porch. The house I live in has a porch, nothing remarkable, but enough space to have a bit of patio furniture (kindly provided by my landlords), and in the warmer seasons, I spend my evenings with a drink and a book, feet up on the empty chair, reading until it’s too dark to do so. This ritual is my most relaxing, after a day/week of work, and it also has the benefit of getting me out of my hot attic apartment in the hottest days of summer. There’s often a breeze on my porch, and it’s shaded in the evenings. Really, my ideal kind of relaxing outside time.
I’ve missed it, a lot, this past winter. I’ve spent these cold and dreary months longing for my chair, a beer sweating on the glass side table, and the joy of reading outside. During the pandemic, it was often the only thing I had to look forward to, and so I’m ready to dive back into that safe, joyous, low-key time spent. I’ve been reading Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May, and her loving, careful descriptions of the very simple, small pleasures in life have reminded me how important it is to enjoy those fully.
However, my enjoyment will include sunscreen from here on out.
Oh, Alison.
Soon, you will need bug repellent to go with the sunscreen. Unfortunately.