What words can I conjure to describe the oppressiveness of last week’s heat? I began to think about hot summer days when I was a child and I heard the weather report given with both temperature and humidity. I remember wondering what humidity was and why anyone would care about it. Last week I found out.
I made the mistake of thinking that 90-ish temperatures were nothing much more than, oh, say 85 degrees. I completely ignored the humidity warnings and headed out to the side garden … planning on a sensible 15 minutes of weeding. In less than five minutes, my hair was so wet from sweating (perspiration for the more gentile) that it looked like I had just washed it. Figure from this that my face and clothing were no less blessed. Dripping was the word.
I poured cold water on my wrists, a strategy from my grandmother’s GDR (Grandmother’s Desk Reference) for being overheated brought back a memory of a piece I wrote more than 10 years ago. I hope you like it.
A tale of two pillows
There was a tree in front of our house in Brooklyn. For years I thought it was the tree referred to in the book and play of the same name. Of course, I also thought that the palisade cliffs on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River were the White Cliffs of Dover. Such is mind of a child.
The sidewalk was broken near that tree, heaving with the pressure from old, large roots that sought water and nutrients in an urban setting. I spent hours playing hopscotch and “Potsy” on those broken pieces of sidewalk. That sidewalk wasn’t like the smooth sidewalk at the top of the street outside of the Flying A garage, nor that of the few remaining pieces of slate that were the old sidewalk near Third Avenue.
I googled my address, and, wonder of wonders, there it was, a contemporary street view of 329-55th St. The tree was gone. The sidewalk was fixed. Without the tree, there was no shade for the airy way, the little courtyard in front of the house. The house, now clad in something modern and expedient, had lost the soft allure of wood siding. The cut glass door at the top of the stoop was also gone, replaced by something sturdier, probably to protect the inhabitants from malefactors who roamed the area even when I was a child.
I noted, with a smile, that there was an air conditioner in one of the second floor windows. How we suffered in the summer’s heat. Outside air could only enter our tall double hung windows through small six-inch-high expandable screens that had glass awnings attached to keep rain out. Air had to struggle to get through that barricade. Searching for a cool spot on one’s pillow was a nightly challenge. Summer sleeping was not fun.
There were other windows 50 miles away in Lake Carmel. The windows in the little bungalow had screens from top to bottom and my grandmother opened the windows as wide as she could. I would lie in the big double bed next to one of these marvelous windows where cooler air flowed freely.
Someone had painted the screens green. Some of that paint had lodged in the holes, giving my childhood mind another thing to ponder. So, there I would lie, peering through the green screen, watching the fireflies dancing in the weeds beyond the big boulder which, by the way you can see on local.live.com.
I would listen to the frogs that lived near the stream in the woods, the cicadas singing their August songs and wonder at the flashes of light in the sky that came without sound.
“That’s heat lightning,” my grandmother would say. “It chases away the heat.”
There were trees in the yard, trees my dad had planted. Two Baldwin apple trees, a pear tree and a cherry tree. Shade for a summer’s dreaming. There were woods close to the house, full of birch and maple with sprinklings of mountain laurel. Deep shade for imagining fairies and palaces and such. Without our Brooklyn broken sidewalks, our games were hide and seek with foot races along the unpaved road my grandmother called “the back lane.” There were pollywogs to catch, barefoot walks to take, swimming in the lake and lying in the sun, rings of daisies around our heads… ease like no other…not a care in the world, not even the care of finding a cool spot on your pillow on a hot city night.
