Do you recall a few days back in winter when Suffolk was blanketed in layers upon layers of billowy snow?

The streets were all slushy or chilled to the point where you’d swear you need only a pair of skates and the proper training to go out and execute the perfect triple axle right on Main Street. The air was cold, brisk and gave your face a subtle but playful slap when you stepped out into the day.

Those were days, when you could slip and fall into a snow bank and laugh, because you knew the only real harm you’d suffer would be a small clump of ice-cold snow lightly pelting you across the face. Those were good times.

I just wanted to remind you good people of Suffolk of those days as we venture out into the next few days of summer. Temperatures in the mid to high nineties will be the norm. And the wonderland we witnessed this winter is long gone. No more icy streets to skate on. No more snow banks to playfully fall into. And falling down in this summer heat is more like a pork chop hitting a hot frying pan than taking a flop on some soft snowflakes.

So, it’s probably best to remember those cooler days in order to get through it all. I find that mind over matter is really the best medicine when it comes to getting through the viciously heated days of summer.

Oddly, though, summer heat is probably just what my diet needs right now. As hot, sticky and seemingly unbearable the weather is, my body undoubtedly responds in the affirmative. And I haven’t researched it or anything, but my metabolism seems to improve, and my appetite seems to decline.

That’s just the magic combination I need to get past that dreaded dieting wall I’ve mentioned so frequently in the past.

Also, the very thought of firing up a stove or standing in a hot line in a restaurant suddenly seems like entirely too much trouble just to get some nourishment.

But I guess the best effect the warm weather seems to have on me is the hypnosis produced by the waves of heat.

Surely the fact that I can actually reduce something so obviously wonderful as food to mere nourishment — suggesting it is no longer the amazing celebration of life that it obviously is in winter — is a direct indication that I am, in fact, under some heat-inspired hex.

Though feeling good about my diet in seemingly unmitigated heat is a bittersweet situation, it is one I hope will last through the summer and lead me to better health by the fall.

So I can’t make a snow angel right now. At least the one I will make in winter this year will be a much thinner, healthier one.