Hot Again

It's hot again. 90-degrees yesterday. 91 predicted for today. So in the hades vernacular of warmth, it's hot, and it's gonna be hot tomorrow, but, of course, it's summer. What can we expect.

It reminds me of when I was a child. In the forties we did not have air conditioning. I remember going to bed in an upstair bedroom with one window. It was hot. I didn't even know the word "oppressively" in those days, but it was oppressively hot in that upstairs bedroom.

My folks would sit out in the back yard until it got cooler, but I was a child and I needed to get to bed earlier or so it seems. I'd sit by the window and let a gentle zephyr or two waft pass me to cool off, but in my memory, it didn't seem to help.

My Mother would say run some cold water over your wrists and that will cool the blood and you'll feel better. For the longest time I thought that worked, but then science told me that was an illusion. Oh well, it worked for my Mother.

One time it was so summer hot that my Dad moved a mattress out on the back yard lawn and we slept there for the night. I loved it. It was the first time I could see the universe in the totality of a nine year old. The stars, oh the stars, what a magnificent sight. Billions and billions of stars, as Carl Sagan would later say on his television programs. To a nine-year old looking up lying on a mattress in the middle of the back yard in a rural area that sight was awesome. I saw shooting stars. I saw the Milky Way. I saw the beginning of time all in my sleepy stare at the stars.

Would that all children could experience that revelation.