Another Summer-less Summer?

Those of us living in the Pacific Northwest survived a wetter and colder than usual spring anxious for the 4th of July and the traditional arrival of our usual dry and warm summer weather. We have a saying that you can't count on summer weather until after the fourth..
Except for last summer when the shift from an El Nino cycle to a La Nina cycle left us with way too much wet and cool weather. Normally that would mean this summer would bring us out of the El and La cycles and ensure a return to the wonderful weeks of warm and dry weather that let us stay sane during the soggy months to come.
And sure enough, we celebrated the weekend of the fourth with wonderful days of sun and blue skies. We spent two rare sunny days in normally dreary Forks. In Shelton, on the fourth We broke out the kayaks and the barbeque and heaved a sigh of relief.
And then the cool air and rains returned. We got an inch during a night of rain Saturday night and more last night. Harry and I looked at our lawn, which had just started into it's summer dormancy and predicted it would start growing again and lawn mowing would be needed soon. Poor Harry. He so looks forward to not having to mow for a couple of months. Looks like a summer-less summer two years in a row. Yuck.

Meanwhile, we are having our usual abundance of green. Sometimes in the summer it almost feels suffocating. All the roadsides and trails billow with green until it feels like you don't dare hold still or it will reach out and engulf like the hedge of thorns around the castle of Sleeping Beauty. Speaking of which, a lot of the blackberry bushes died down last year in the hard crack unusually long cold spell. I've never seen the brambles so bare. It must have been good for them, because they grew back this summer to heights I've never seen before. The vines behind our house are a deep screen that is up to the second story now and obscures the view from all the ground floor windows.
I'll finish with an old joke that applies this year...A guy moved here one fall and in early spring wrote his friends back home, "Hey, you guys ought to move out here, they don't have any winter!" The next August he writes them again, "Never mind, they don't have a summer either..".