I’ve made my peace with summer, but it took a long time.

After spending my teens and early twenties dreading it because of low-paying summer jobs and growing up in a home with no air conditioning, I’ve learned to appreciate its simplicity and beauty.

I’ve even made peace with the hot, sweaty yard work that accompanies the warm weather months.

I can’t begin to tell you why, but these days I strangely look forward to the time spent behind my little push mower, though I spend that time earlier in the day when the heat is a tiny bit less oppressive.

I read somewhere that it’s good for us to sweat a little; it pumps some of the toxins out of your body, or something like that. I have no idea if that’s true but if it is, I’m losing about a bucket full of toxins each mowing.

My journey with summer has taken many twists and turns.

I was much less fond of yard work in my childhood — in fact, I was regularly threatened with all sorts of frightening punishment for dragging my feet in that area.

“That yard had better be mowed when I get home,” I can still hear my father say.

He had a booming voice and he was a man who meant what he said.

I would usually get around to the task sometime around the eleventh hour, but he would sometimes surprise me ahead of schedule, leaving me to sprint out the front door as he came in the side.

Few people in my neighborhood owned riding mowers in my youth. We were townies, not country folk, and a push mower was all any of us really needed.

My father waited until we left the nest before he purchased a riding mower.

In fact at the time he passed, he owned one of the expensive zero turn models; his way of rubbing it in our faces.

I’m also old enough to remember life before weed eaters, when trimming was accomplished with a pair of metal shears that rubbed blisters on your hands after about ten minutes of use, even when wearing gardening gloves.

My mom seemed to enjoy that task, to my great relief. I still can’t imagine a more torturous way to spend a Saturday afternoon in July.

So, I was more of a fall-winter guy growing up. We had no large trees in our yard, so there was a minimum of raking in the fall, and winter gave me a break from yard chores altogether.

The unofficial end of summer, Labor Day, was a strange holiday in the Bernhardt household.

True, there was no school, but our family had a unique and unpleasant tradition.

It was the day the screens would be removed from each window, thoroughly scrubbed, and put away until spring.

Upon completion of that drudgery, every glass, plate, bowl and casserole dish in our home would be removed from its cabinet, and then washed, dried, and returned to its proper shelf, which had been freshly lined with bug repellent shelf paper.

Did I mention I hated Labor Day?

So mark me down as a recent convert to the summer-loving man I am today.

It was a long road through a sweaty childhood.

Kent Bernhardt is a long time local broadcaster, humorist, and host of the Salisbury Symphony’s “Bury Home Companion.”