During the day, in truly sultry weather, my sister and I
would hide out in her room in the attic, which boasted the largest, loudest, most powerful air conditioner I’ve still ever seen. A behemoth of a window unit, it took over the
whole window, and was installed permanent year-round because no sane person
wanted to risk lifting that monster. In my
parents’ room, meanwhile, a more ordinary window unit hummed along with vastly
more energy efficiency on oppressive July nights.
In my room, an aging window fan moved the humidity
around, the effect much like being the jet exhaust of an airplane. The room stayed stubbornly hot, but the noise
and wind provided distraction.
I remember nights lolling on top of the sheets watching shadows on the
ceiling, sometimes with my nightgown wetted down with tap water and the idea that
evaporative magic would leave me cooler, not just clammy. I knew if I turned the blasting fan off -- and
I did sometimes when the noise failed to outweigh the swirl of air -- I’d hear
the summer crickets and frogs, the occasional car driving by, the rustle of
wind through the crabapple tree in the backyard, perhaps a rumble of thunder to
go with flashes of heat lightning if a storm lurked. The sense floated that unlike the
climate-controlled inside, I was sleeping outside, awash in the elements, that I was
part of nature and velvet night, in the wild zone of secrets bestowed upon
those awake while others slept.
For the last three days, here in my adult life in Fredericton,
NB, a heat wave has consumed the city, with highs reaching into the
mid-90s. Floridians (as I have been and
will be again) experience this as a matter of course, but not so in the Canadian
Maritimes. As proof, I offer up that my
apartment, like many in the city, does not have air conditioning. For the past several days, I’ve closed the
blinds and windows in the morning in the hopes of holding the cool captive inside
through the heat of the day. The apartment
and I have shambled along by day mildly cooler and certainly darker and mustier
than the great outdoors.
It’s evening now on the last day of the wave. The windows are open wide and still humid but
finally cooling night air is drifting in. I have the ceiling fan at the 2nd
highest setting because at the highest setting it swings from its stalk and makes noises that suggest it might launch itself from its mooring. The night and the breeze on my skin, the few sounds
of a neighborhood mostly quiet, leaves me homesick for summer in my childhood
bedroom, for that loud fan and the favorite pillowcase with a cartoon walrus on
it, for the shelves crammed full of books and board games and stuffed animals, for
the wooden dressing table from my mother’s childhood bedroom and the fish tank in
the corner with the one stubborn algae eater sturdier than all the goldfish
carted home from the elementary school carnival. I am homesick for summer in the bedroom with
the unquestioned, unacknowledged comfort of my mother sleeping in the next room.
In my adult life here in Canada, July 4th marked the 5-year anniversary of my mother’s death. I miss her every day in some little way, Mom
being woven into the fabric of my every day of childhood, that is to say, the time that
I was becoming a person, and so here I am, always a little frayed and unraveled
without her. I often drink my morning
tea from the same blue and white ceramic mug from which she drank her coffee. Some days, holidays and anniversaries and
heat waves, remind me more of the details.
So here is what I want to tell you: once or many times – childhood memory
being murky the way it is – my mother and I sat on the screened-in porch and
watched torrential rain fall in heavy sheets.
Wind pushed bursts of water through the screens turning it to mist, the storm
spray and deluge offering a shared exhilaration
and providing a temporary respite from the long slog of a hot summer in suburban
Maryland.
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