Bless the Lord, fire and heat

It's hot in Chicago. It's supposed to cool down tonight... but it's been a tough couple days without air conditioning. I've inherited some disdain for AC from my dad, who loves to remember his adolescence in Iowa, sweating on his front porch, drinking lemonade, and watching summer thunderstorms roll in. My mom doesn't understand this at all. So, every year my dad puts a window unit into the living room for her, and she spends most of July and August there, reading, sleeping, and drinking ice water. She always tells the story of her first day in America, getting off the airplane in 1949 in New York City, fresh from Oslo. She was six years old, and her first breath of American air felt, she says, as if someone had just opened the door of an oven - a slow draft of hot, suffocating air. It was 99 degrees that day. Her Viking blood just can't handle it.

I'm no aficionado of hot weather, but I guess I prefer to let my body get used to it. Ever noticed how the feel of your body changes with the weather? I feel like the biochemistry of my skin shifts in the summer, and moving from cold to hot all the time screws with that. So, I have electric fans everywhere. I take cold showers. I go to the beach. I make peace with sweat. I drink ice water. And I use a trick my brother and I discovered when we were little and trying to sleep without air conditioning... you take a towel, either a full size or a hand towel, run it under the faucet, wring it out, and then sleep on top of it or under it, and the moisture on your skin combined with a fan = GREAT. I even get cold at night when I do this. Yes, the mattress gets a little damp, but it dries pretty quick.

I'm also addicted to fresh air. One of the 240 things I hated about working for the law firm was being sealed inside a high rise office building eight hours a day, especially in the summer, where it was absolutely FRIGID inside our building. I wore sweaters more in the summer than in the winter. Plus, super hot weather is sporadic in Chicago, so if my windows are sealed up with an AC unit, I don't get any fresh air when it's in the 80s or 70s.

I love winter, but I miss fresh air then, too. A coworker at Gould Farm, Tamsin, used to sleep out on her screened-in porch all year round... even in the winter. She loved it. I don't know if I would go that far, but I would feel like a bad ass if I could.