This one is a real gem and explains the best place to live.
June 2010
Gardenias
Shortly after Mother’s Day, I bought a gardenia bush bearing a label that promised it not only easy to care for, but winter hardy.
I was dubious.
I don’t know about the winter hardiness yet, but I plopped the bush in the ground and we were promptly hit with hazy, hot and humid weather. Humid though it was, we missed all the pop-up thunderstorms. The poor thing roasted. It turned yellow and I was sure it was dying a gruesome death.
Eventually the rain arrived and outdid itself. When I walk in the garden there is a clearly audible squishing and sucking sound.
While surveying what is slowly turning into an unplanned pond, I was surprised to find the yellow bits were buds forming.
The gardenia is blooming. So far, just one perfect flower. Thus far the gardenia has survived scorching and drowning.
I picked that one perfect flower and the fragrance has scented this entire room to the point that it’s almost overwhelming.
The bush looks ready to burst with multiple blooms. There are at least 30 buds, some still tightly closed and other beginning to unfurl.
If the gods favor me, it will stop raining soon, my yard will cease to be a mud bog, the heatwave will break and I’ll be able to sit outside and enjoy the blooming.
I have high hopes of spending an evening in the garden drunk on one of nature’s most glorious scents.
Locking Great Aunt Bertha in the Attic
I’ve noticed the more extreme the situation, the more apt I am to use clichés.
All I can say is it is hotter’n’hell and there’s a reason Great Aunt Bertha went insane and had to be locked in the attic.
I am near tears with the misery of this heat and the indignities of menopause.
The lack of air conditioning in my life means I’m focusing on one minute at a time – what I can do to get through the next 60 seconds.
When I left the house this morning, it was 80 degrees at 8:45 a.m. It was 94 when I left work. Besides hot, the area around me is water logged and continues to be under threat of violent thunderstorms. These storms rundle through with great crashes of thunder and lightening. The temperature drops 10 to 15 degrees and then ratchets right back up, more humid than ever. The weather people mutter about stalled fronts and whatnot.
Gills would come in handy about now. I don’t know the biomechanics of such, but I’m certain the body’s processing of a cup of water or so to every breath must entail some wear and tear on the lungs. More than likely, it increases body temperature.
It is only June. This sort of meteorological nightmare shouldn’t emerge until late July or August. If I try to imagine a whole summer of this, I may start screaming and never stop. 60 seconds of life at a time in this heat is all I can manage.
According to all manner of happiness experts, one moment at a time is the best way to live life under any circumstance. I am whining one moment at a time. This is probably not what they meant.
Periodically, I stop to cogitate on how for most of history folks lived without air conditioning and how for a good couple hundred years they did so while wearing a lot of clothes. I keep telling myself I should be thankful that I can strip down to bare skin while refreshing the Weather Channel website in hopes that an updated forecast promising unseasonably cool temperatures will appear.
When my grandmother went through menopause, air conditioning was unheard of and she was forced by societal norms to wear a heap of clothes – bras and girdles and hosiery and slips and gloves and all manner of layers of fabric. In the era before hers, long sleeves and long skirts were de rigueur.
Novels and stories abound about women locked in attics because they went insane and their people had to do something with them. While I don’t know for certain that menopausal women wearing a lot of clothes went crazy and had to be locked in the attic lest they run through town naked and raving was ever a norm, the idea doesn’t seem too far fetched. I do wonder where they got the energy to run.
The big white floor fan and the ceiling fans are the only reason I haven’t been locked in an attic. Well, that and the fact that I don’t have an attic and there’s nobody here to witness my madness.
Thunder has moved into the neighborhood while I wrote this. The temperature inside the house has decreased by a degree or so. I can feel the air freshening. Perhaps, I won’t wake in a pool of sweat later in the night and, even better, maybe I’ll sleep through the night. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the storm that drives the stalled front out of here.
For the next 60 seconds, I will hope and focus on the maybes.
Birthday Balloons
It’s Chef Boy “R Mine’s 25th birthday today.
Until he was 19, I hung balloons over his crib or bed in the middle of the night so he could wake to a visible reminder that the new day was his birthday.
Once he moved out-of-state this birthday ritual proved more challenging. Most years I managed in one way or another though not always over his bed. This year I’m relying on a florist to at least get to his porch. Twenty-five balloons weighted by chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be delivered before noon today.
I’ve said it before – the day he was born was the best day of my life.
W. Va. Fur and Root 