Yesterday I was home, tackling some tasks when my head suddenly drooped and I nearly fell asleep. I did not need a nap, and I wasn’t ill. The homestead had simply gotten a little warm.
I’m a big fan of conditioned air and greatly appreciate it. But I’m not the biggest fan of paying for it, so I leave the A/C set pretty high. It takes a heat to kick it on and a heat was what I had yesterday.
When I was a wee lass, living with my great-grandparents in Zebulon, GA, there was no such thing as conditioned air in their old house. If it hit 109 degrees outside, it was surely 111 inside. I seem to remember an old movable fan, and there was one in a window of the bedroom where all us kids slept with Granny, but it was next to Big Papa’s bed and he was the only beneficiary of its swirling, hot air. You’d think sleeping in such heat would lead one to toss and turn, but you’d be wrong. Even a 6-year-old knows to lie as still as possible during the wrath of summer. And when you’re sharing an old-school, full-sized bed with your two little sisters and your great-grandmother, well, you lie still as stone and try to avoid contact. Another person’s body heat is the last thing you want when you’re about to drown in a genuine southern glisten. On those nights, the vapors weren’t a threat. Actual dying was.
I am incredibly spoiled now, I admit. And yesterday, just when I thought I might topple over, lulled into sleep by tricky heat, the old A/C turned on and I was saved. I would prefer to live with modern conveniences than to go without, but sometimes, when my mind strolls back to that rickety house in Zebulon, I can see Granny – clear as day. She’s sitting on the front porch, cooling herself with a cardboard fan on a wooden stick, printed with the details of some long-dead person’s funeral. Her slight hand movement is the only stirring on the porch. The heat is so thick you can see it, radiating up from the parched, brown grass. Papa is there, too. It’s so hot he’s resisting the urge to fill his pipe with Prince Albert. No one says much. And time, like the heat, slows down and wraps itself around us all. It is in the moment of that memory that I would gladly leave my comfortable, temperate home – just to see Granny and Papa one more time. And, like them, I would simply sit in the silence and be still. Waiting for the sun to set and for the first lightning bugs of the evening to sashay around the yard.