One of the 5-year-old grandkids emerged from her bedroom the other night, stood in the hallway and announced, “I’m sweating bullets in here!”
It’s been that kind of kick-off to summer. There’s not much you can do about the heat (especially when you’re too short to reach the thermostat) except to go with the flow.
Naturally, the first rule of heat survival is to make no sudden moves, which would explain a recent get together.
There were 15 lawn chairs for adults and a half dozen or so chairs for little ones set in a circle under three large shade trees.
As is our custom, we talked and ate and talked some more and ate some more. The kids played, grew flush and downed juice boxes. Someone collected all the dirty paper plates. Someone else gave all the kids another spray of sunscreen.
Early afternoon melted into mid-afternoon and someone noted that they were now sitting in the sun.
“Looks like our shade moved,” someone offered.
“Sure does,” another confirmed.
It was quiet for a bit, then someone observed, “Suppose it will just keep moving.”
“Suppose so.”
Everybody looked up at the tree canopy then over to where the circle of shade was slowly relocating.
“Maybe we should move the circle.”
That suggestion was met with stone-cold silence. The last thing anybody wanted to do was pick up and move. Except for those in the sun, and they looked too hot and dehydrated to pick up chairs and move. That’s the power of summer heat — people who are ordinarily hard-working and industrious are reduced to shapeless mounds of immovable goo.
“Seems like a lot of work to move all the chairs,” somebody said.
“Why don’t we just move the chairs on that side since they’re the ones in the sun?”
The group pondered in silence. And sweat.
“That would change the circle into more of an oval, but it’s better than everyone moving.”
Although there seemed to be general agreement, there was still no movement.
“A lot cooler when that breeze was blowing.”
Somebody came out of the house and asked if anybody needed anything. I asked for a glass of ice water. I would have waited on myself, but I was holding a sleeping baby, which is akin to holding a small inferno, which gives one a permanent pass from moving in the heat.
When it is hot enough, just sitting can constitute a heavy workload. No doubt this is where the expression “go work on my tan” comes from. How do you work at getting scorched? You just lie real still.
They say it’s going to be a hot one this year. The summer forecast shows most of the country in a big red swatch marked “higher than average temperatures.”
We’ll have a lot of time to work on our sitting in the shade skills.
