Summer Heat

Summer Heat

It’s been mostly in the mid 90s during the day and the low 70s at night for the last month here where I live in Lynchburg, Virginia.  It’s so hot that I spend most of the time inside our house with our great air conditioning.  

When I look outside, I see grass turning brown, dry leaves dying and falling from the trees around the house.  I dream of fall and cold weather and snow, and I know they won’t be here soon enough, but I’m happy that we have air conditioning at least.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. In the 1960s when I was a kid living with my parents in Chicago, we had no air conditioning, neither central air nor window units. In fact, none of my friends had it either.  If we wanted to cool off, we’d sit outside in the shadow of a tree, or if we had a quarter we’d go to one of the upscale movie theaters in the area that had air conditioning. 

I remember when I used to work in factories during summer vacation when I was a college student.  One job was particularly tough.  I loaded TV sets into trucks.  I’d spend all day every day in hot trucks. One time we took the temperature in one of the trucks, and it was 110 degrees.  The factory had no air conditioning, so the bosses who ran the place would have a big jar of salt pills on a desk on the loading dock, and we would be popping the pills all day long like they were some kind of crazy candy.  

I would come home from that job and turn on the desk fan and just sit in front of the TV watching baseball, and I didn’t even like baseball. Just sitting and not moving at all helped to push back some of that heat.

Some nights it got so hot in the house that the whole family would go downstairs to the basement and sleep on rugs on the cement floor down there. That cement floor was so cool that sometimes we had to bring blankets to the basement to wrap ourselves up in. And other times it was so hot that even the basement wasn’t cool enough. There were nights when it was so hot that we’d take our blankets and walk over to Humboldt Park and sleep in a field with our neighbors. 

I can’t imagine it getting hotter in the years to come, but that’s what people are saying.  The earth’s climate is changing.  The world is getting hotter.  I’m not looking forward to the day when even air conditioning won’t be enough.  

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy