Warmest wishes
It’s hot.
It’s been record breaking hot.
It’s still so hot I may have to turn on the AC this afternoon.
If it gets hot enough, that is…
What can I say? I’m a hopeless sweat junkie. I crave hot days like a bee craves honey, a cat craves mice, a frog craves flies. I draw an absolutely reptilian pleasure from an afternoon basking in a backyard solar furnace. There comes a profound relaxation with long, languid days baking in the shade -- the atmospheric equivalent of cooking with indirect heat on a charcoal grill. Hot enough for me? I can usually go a few degrees more.
It may well be genetic, this lust for nature’s heat. It may well be a deep, deep longing passed down from ancestors who shivered through unending winter nights a few day’s sail from the Arctic Circle; folks who settled Iceland and in bursts of Nordic optimism christened the ice-bound island even further to the north Greenland and the far frosty tundra across the sea Vineland.
These were people for whom heat was a rare, prized thing. Hard to come by for most of the year. A phenomena to be shamelessly hoarded when it was to be had. People who looked to the sky with longing, gleefully shedding mukluks and parkas to soak up the sun, should the sun ever choose to shine.
Yes, I am of a pale skinned people. Bleached white as winter through generation after generation of regarding the sun as an aberrant bright spot in the sky; our melanin-deprived flesh all the better to soak up the solar rays to keep rickets at bay.
As for me, well, I’ve grown up with nice straight leg bones – and not from drinking prodigious quantities of vitamin D enriched milk. Make hay – and play – while the sun shines, was the phrase I grew up with. And if the sun was hot, well, winter is cold … get used to it.
And we did. Growing up in Caledonia I recall the movie theater as air conditioned and Danaher’s new hardware store. Shorty Russert installed AC in the IGA so folks wouldn’t be tempted to stand holding their heads in the freezer case, cooling off while the ice cream started melting. Save for these rare islands of chill, indoor cooling was pretty much limited to a fan in the window and a cold glass of water to replenish the sweat dripping from your chin and soaking your shirt.
Yeah, summer came with hot. When it got really bad you might hose yourself down or soak your feet in a cold water creek, but mostly, we just sweat and looked for a shady spot with a breeze.
Of course, as kids we dressed for the season, which meant sturdy blue jeans down past our ankles to protect knees and shins when sliding into third base, dumping your bike on a crushed rock road or wading through thickets of waist high thistles, nettles and thorn bushes to get to the creek bank fishing hole. Shorts were an affectation, unsuited for play or for baling hay or cleaning calf pens. Apparel seen on the cover of the Boy Scout Handbook, but nowhere else in our young lives.
But now, with global warming has come universal refrigeration. There’s nary an enclosed space which doesn’t feature a chiller unit on the roof, near the wall or in a window that hums and dribbles from spring thaw to first frost. Stop into a neighborhood saloon for a cold one on a hot one and the bartender will be outfitted for the sub-arctic while the patrons sit around blue-lipped and goose-fleshed considering a switch from gin and tonics to Tom and Jerries…
Yeah, but outside it’s hot. So you hang in there. January’s comin’…
In the meantime, I think I’ll just enjoy the summer weather.