The air conditioner is keeping the humidity at bay, but I feel a bit like a hermit. The closed windows and doors isolate me. No outside sounds, no people can be heard. Rod Serling could be standing in front of a camera on the front steps to introduce this episode of The Twilight Zone. I can hear him now,”Inside this house Kathleen Ryan sits in isolation, comfortable and cool and totally unaware that the world outside her walls has changed, but soon enough she’ll know she has entered The Twilight Zone.”

The morning is sunny with a slight breeze, but I can already feel the heat when I open the door to let Gracie in and out. According to the weather in the paper, the humidity will start to lessen tomorrow.

I don’t remember the weather being such a complicated topic when I was a kid. It was hot or cold or comfortable. There were no ten-day forecasts or drawings of cold fronts sweeping down from Canada. Forecasting was iffy at best, and the weatherman, always a man back then, was the target when his forecast went awry, and it went awry often. The best way to check the weather was to walk outside.

We seldom got sick when I was growing up. I think it had to do with the world being far less sanitized than it is now. We did get measles, mumps and chicken pox, but those were expected and there was nothing you could do about them. The worst was the itch from chicken pox. My mother went crazy making sure we didn’t scratch, “Do you want scars all over your face?” Then there was the possibility of blindness from measles. My mother kept the shades down and muted the light from the lamp by covering the shade. I couldn’t read or watch TV so lying in bed doing nothing made having measles seem interminable. The only thing I remember about the mumps is how huge my face and neck felt. I don’t know who brought home the mumps first but all four if us got sick at just about the same time. All I can think of is my poor mother!