Soaring temperatures fire heated debate
Lori Borgman | Monday, Aug 02 2010
It is a great triumph, when sizzling in the summer heat, if
you are able to convince others that your heat is far more miserable than
theirs. After all, who wants to be average? We are a people who pride ourselves
in extremes.
When our
daughter, who lives in the Southwest, mentions that it has been 104 degrees
there again, I say, “Yes, dear, but it’s a dry heat. If you want to really
suffer, you should come home.” (As though this is the way to lure your adult
children back home.)
“What’s
the temperature there?” she asks.
“Well,
it’s only 88, but that’s with 98 percent humidity. You walk out the front door
in the morning and it feels like you’re walking into a sauna fully clothed.”
She says,
“It’s so awful here, we wait until 8 at night to go on a walk.”
“What
happens at 8?” I ask.
“The
temperature cools to 96.”
I tell her
that the last time her father and I went for a walk, the allergens hanging in
the air and clinging to the trees were so heavy that I inhaled and started
choking. “Your father had to do the Heimlich on me,” I say. “I coughed up a
large pollen ball.”
I have her
with the pollen ball. She pauses for a second, and then ups the ante. “It’s too
hot for trees to grow here. Trees give shade and we don’t have any shade either.
You’re lucky you have trees.”
“What’s
lucky? We’ve had so many storms that every week we’re out picking up tree limbs.
You’re the ones who are fortunate – dry heat and no trees!”
She
counters that humidity is supposed to be good for your skin and prevent
wrinkles. I told her I just passed by a mirror and have firm, or rather not so
firm, evidence to the contrary.
I respond
that dry heat is supposed to be good for your bones.
She says
it may be good for your bones, but it’s hard on your hands – some days you need
a hot pad to touch the steering wheel and gear shift.
I ask if she read about that man who went out to get his mail barefoot and
burned the bottom of his feet on his sidewalk.
She says
yes and immediately notes that he was from their part of the country. “It’s so
hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk here.”
“That’s
nothing,” I say. “Last night I steamed broccoli by holding it out the kitchen
window.”
I point out that at least they have that nice breeze that accompanies their
comfortable dry heat.
“The nice
breeze, as you call it, is like standing behind a jet engine,” she says.
I thought I had smoked the high heat and sufferable humidity versus the dry
heat and jet engine breeze debate when the window incident occurred. A frosted
window in their bathroom, which faces east and absorbs the morning sun, cracked
and spread like a spider’s web, shattering the window into a thousand tiny
pieces.
“The man replacing the window said it very well could have been from the
heat,” she says.
They win.
