Before my family and I moved to Kansas, 18 years ago next month, I didn’t consider summer my favorite season. As a perpetual student and then a college professor, summer vacations were obviously a nice break, and of course summer activities were fun. But compared with flowers in the spring, foliage in the fall and snow in the winter, summer just didn’t impress me.
The sunflower state changed that. People complain about the heat, humidity and wind, but I found it all quite wonderful. Getting on my bike and hitting the long, straight county roads, looking across golden wheat fields and rolling green pastures towards a broad and blue horizon, with sunflowers along the way — it was beautiful, and made me a firm fan of Kansas summers.
That did involve some adjustments, though. For example: when are the lazy “dog days” of summer? As a scholar of politics as well as a fan of the season, this actually mattered to me. Growing up in Washington state, August was the tired, tail-end of summer, the time when everyone mentally checked out, and I carried that assumption into my professional life.
Living and studying in Washington, D.C., August was so disregarded by many who worked there that there were humorous calls to abolish it.
August was when the parties and agencies mopped up unfinished business, if they worked at all, just waiting for politics to re-ignite in the fall. But in Kansas, whose approach to the calendar had historically followed agricultural patterns distinct fro.