”I am cruel thirsty this hot weather… nothing makes me so excessively peevish as hot weather.”
The morning is already hot at 81°. Nala was panting. Now, she is having her morning nap. I am in the back of the house in the den. It doesn’t get sun until the afternoon so it is coolish. I haven’t turned on the AC yet but it’s coming. I like the cold the AC brings but with windows and doors closed I miss the sounds of the birds, the bang of the acorns hitting the deck and the swoosh of the leaves in the breeze.
When I was a kid, we didn’t even have a fan. All the windows and doors were open, but the house was hot. The living room was always dark. My mother kept the sun out by covering the windows. My sisters used to run through the sprinkler to get cool in the hot afternoon. I don’t remember being bothered by the heat. I always wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse and sneakers. They were dirty white sneakers with pointed toes. An axiom I figured out as I grew older is the dirtier the white sneakers the younger you are. It’s sort of the same with ice cream. The drippier the cone the younger you are.
I remember a small pond in the woods a bit of a distance from the house. One summer my brother and I built a raft though built is probably an exaggeration. We used vines to connect the branches and pieces of trunks we found in the woods. We launched our raft. Our raft sank, and we got wet. We thought it was funny. We did dry quickly.
In the middle of the field at the bottom of my street was a bubbler. The water was always cold. We taught the dog how to drink from the bubbler. Of course, we had to hold the button. I remember when we walked the tracks, there was a spot where water gurgled from a pipe. The water below the pipe formed a bit of a stream and was clear. We could see the dirt. We used to drink from the pipe. We used to eat any berries we found except for the small round red berries. My brother ate some once and had to have his stomach pumped.
This is my uke free day. I have a concert tomorrow so today is my errand day. The weekend is my housecleaning day. I have to wash the kitchen floor. I can’t stand it anymore.
Explore posts in the same categories: Musings
keepthecoffeecoming.blog 
August 1, 2024 at 11:32 pm
Hi Kat,
Today it’s a clear sky with a high of 100°. We had a pretty sunset due to dust carried across the Atlantic Ocean from the Sahara Desert.
When we first moved to Dallas in April 1953, we realized that Air Conditioning would be a necessity rather than a luxury. Our first apartment had none, so we bought a window unit. Eventually, my parents bought a house and it had central AC. My father had an air conditioner installed in his Buick. The AC unit they installed in that car was huge and you could hang meat in the back seat.
The entire sunbelt from the East Coast to Arizona would not exist without air conditioning.
August 1, 2024 at 11:43 pm
Hi Bob,
Today stayed ugly so my air conditioning is still on. Tomorrow too will be hot with scattered thundershowers. August is my least favorite summer month. It is always hot and humid.
My parents used fans then they bought window AC’s for the bedrooms. I have no idea why they didn’t get central air. Before we sold the house we added it.
I started with a fan then a window unit then central air. I love being in the cool house.
I would never want to live in the southwest.