Summer Lovin' With Caitlin

Hi everyone!  My name is Caitlin and I blog over at To Make Love Stay. I live in New Mexico with

 my wildland firefighter husband Rob and our beastie, Cypress.  I work from home as a software 

consultant (with some intermittent traveling) and I also blog about our life, marriage, fire season, anxiety 

and depression, tattoos, photography, and other random fun things I come across.

Summer is my absolute favorite season and for that reason I am always down to write about it, so thanks 

to Liv for giving me this opportunity.

For my guest post today I'm going to talk about how summer and what it means to me has really 

changed over the past year.

Rob and I grew up in eastern Maine and aside from various months spent in Wisconsin, Alaska, Iraq,

 and Moscow between the two of us, we spent most of our summers there.  Summers in Maine 

meant mosquitoes, badass July 4th celebrations, swimming, barbecues, bonfires, ice cream, and lots 

of lobster.

When we moved into our first apartment together four years ago, we lived in Western Maine; same 

number of bugs, less ocean, basically.  We'd spend our days by the river with our dog, getting 

sunburned and swatting at deer flies.

Last October, Rob informed me that he wanted to become a Hotshot, or a Wildland Firefighter, out 

west.  My job is (fortunately) pretty flexible, requiring only an airport for the aforementioned traveling, 

so I told him that I'd go wherever he went.  He applied and by February of this year we found ourselves

 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For this reason, summer is totally different this year.  Not bad different, just...different. Whereas I've 

always looked forward to summer as a time to spend with Rob and my family and enjoy the

 beautiful weather, this year we probably won't see too much of each other until September or 

October when the fires die down and I'm 3600 miles away from any family. As a result I find myself 

having to find new and different ways to enjoy myself in a vastly different culture and climate.

I've also always associated summer with swimming, but in a place where water is hard to come by

 (and cactuses are not) I don't find myself in the water nearly as often as I'd like. And did you notice all

 that beautiful green in the photos above?  We don't see a ton of that here.

On the plus side, though, we have some kickass sunsets, no bugs (minus the giant-ass tarantulas 

I'm expecting to find in my bed), and near-constant sunshine.  Most importantly, I'm living out an 

exciting new chapter in our lives with my husband absent, but still always by my side, and for that I 

can't really complain.  

So though I find myself trying to speed summer along so I can get to winter (when Rob has 6 months off 

until next fire season) I'm really trying to stop and enjoy just how unique and different this summer 

is juxtaposed against all the other summers I've had.  I hope you get time to do the same thing over the 

next few months.

Thanks for having me, Liv! I hope you all have a great summer!