Reflections on the Eighth Week of Summer - A Time to Sweat 

    “You don't have air conditioning?” The woman pulling a bathing suit up her long thin legs in the YMCA locker room arched her eyebrows. “How do you manage?”

    I shrugged. “Spence is a temperature controller extraordinarie.”

    When the sun hits the house, Spence closes windows to keep out the heat. When the sun sinks behind the woods in the evening, he opens windows to get a breeze. Fans, the eight inch thick log walls, and the cool basement help maintain a comfortable balance. With an average high of 80º and low of 57º for the second week of August, Spence's system works fine.

    This week wasn't average.

    On Monday the temperature started two degrees above normal. By Saturday it had increased to twelve degrees more than the average high and fourteen degrees above the average low. Rather than pulling up the blanket for the morning cool, Spence peeled off his drenched T-shirt and sighed.

    Humidity made the heat worse. My glasses fogged when I stepped outside. Bare arms stuck to wood armrests. Juicy Fruit gum softened to the consistency of Silly Putty and stuck to its wrappers. Because tape lost its stick, refrigerator notes drifted to the floor.

    Friday, I had driven to Meadville to escape the humid heat in the YMCA swimming pool. At the beginning of lap swim, five regulars sorted out lanes. “Let Janet swim in the far lane. She doesn't mind the open door.”

    Mind? Each time I swam back to the shallow end, the fan in the doorway blew refreshing air over my wet body. I wanted to swim more than my usual two thirds mile, but my right knee swelled into cream puff dimples and throbbed as if it were in charge of pumping blood through my body. I climbed out of the pool, took a cool shower, and drove home under the hot August sun. Was the car air conditioner even working?

    Five quarts of bread and butter pickles cooled on the porch. I stepped into what definitely felt like air conditioning to greet Spence.

    Barefoot, he wiped his forehead and said, “It's hotter inside than out.”

    Though he'd heated water in the huge canning kettle to a boil for half an hour then processed the pickles in the hot water bath for another fifteen minutes, he was wrong. The kitchen was 82.4º. Outside was 86.4º with a heat index of 95º.

    In the afternoon, I climbed to the loft, turned on the steam iron and, while sweat oozed through my hair and rolled down my face, pressed half triangle squares for Mom's memorial quilt.

    As Ecclesiastes says, “To everything there is a season . . .” a time to sweat and a time to pull up the blankets.