Heat

We’re in the fifth day of a heat wave, with probably two more days coming, temperatures well over 100.  Driving home from an afternoon of Mah Jongg and friendship in Lois’ blessedly air conditioned house yesterday I saw 115 on the thermometer as I passed the exit for Peasanton. Jay and I took Charlie and Hazel for two days in an air conditioned hotel just around the corner over the weekend.  It was a lovely little vacation. Back at home I close all the windows in the morning to keep out a little of the heat, and the house does stay about 10 degrees cooler than the oven outside.  I do whatever I’m going to get done for the day before 11, and then I park myself in front of a fan.  Charlie and Hazel stretch out full length on the floor.  Jay is working in this dreadful heat.

In the summer in Amenia we had such heat – worse because it was so humid. But easier to bear because we had the lake.  Best of all, a hot afternoon might be broken by a visit from Phil Cianciolo, our beloved fruit and vegetable man.  We would hear his truck crossing the second bridge on our dirt road, thumping over a perennially loose board. It gave us just enough time to run out to the road as his truck pulled up.  He would be sweating in the heat, but always cheerful.  He would review his bounty with Mom – look at dem peaches, smell dat melon.  Phil especially loved to stroke a melon and sing its praises, gazing at Mom in her red swimsuit. When the shopping was done he would carry her purchases into the kitchen and set them on the long counter of the old kitchen – long before the new kitchen was added and the living room reconfigured. He would take his stub of a pencil from behind his ear and write down the amounts for each item on a bit of paper torn from a brown paper bag and do the addition under Mom’s watchful eye. Such a bounty of fruits and vegetables!  Such a lovely interruption to a sweltering afternoon.  And then he would give us a ride into town, perched on the sides of the open truck or on the tailgate.  We would take our quarters to Reuben’s drug store for ice cream cones and comic books and walk back up our road, trying to lick the ice cream fast enough to keep it from melting all over our hands.

I suppose we were bored, and maybe irritable, on those long, hot afternoons, but that isn’t what I remember, just as I don’t remember the poison ivy or the bee stings or the mosquitos. I remember the smell of the hot grass after Dave mowed it, the delicious first steps into the cool lake, the days without clocks or obligations. I’ve largely returned to the leisure of summer childhood, with only the few commitments and obligations I choose.  And just now, I heard my sister Tamar’s voice – on the phone, from 3000 miles away, but still, a sister’s voice on a hot summer day.  There are a few dear people, other than my sweet sisters, who remember the magic of those summers.  Our parents’ generation are all gone now, but many of those who were kids together in Amenia remain and cherish our shared memories. I miss those of our generation that we lost far too young – so many families touched by tragedy.  Andy Silk, Leon Swirsky, Naomi Rapkin, and of course our dearest Shayne, the leader of the pack.  There is no consolation for those early deaths, but there is our memory of them as happy children, swimming in Amenia on a hot day, eating the fragrant peaches Phil brought, riding his truck into town for ice cream.