Hot, hot, hot

I have a very old and very dear friend who lives in Dallas. 

We frequently text throughout the week, and have a regularly scheduled catch up call on Sunday morning.

Most of the our recent text exchanges include some variation on the "it's hot out" emoji. And our Sunday convos are increasingly consumed by yammering about the weather. 

Dallas has, of course, been hot, hot, hot. Days on end with temps over 100, and the real feel temp on many days over 105...With no relief in sight. 

Each morning, when I get up, I check the 10 day forecast for Dallas. And sigh. 

The heat is enervating, depressing. Joyce and Tom are feeling trapped in their house, venturing out only to run an occasional (and essential) errand. And given our age, some of those essential ventures are medical or dental. (Both of them have experienced dental emergencies in the last couple of weeks.) 

It's been too hot in Dallas to use the pool. The passenger side window on Joyce's car dropped into open mode, so Joyce was carless for a few days while it was repaired. You certainly can't go tootling around Dallas in a car with no AC.

Joyce is an excellent cook, but she's doing a lot of salads these days. Tom is the grill master, but the evenings are too hot to fire up the grill.

When we talk about the heat, we always drift into the folks in Texas who are less fortunate than Joyce and Tom who live in a beautiful home with central air. They're in a leafy neighborhood with lots of permanent conservation land surrounding them. 

We talk about the folks who work outside, who deliver their mail, who provide their yard care and pool care. Those who live in small homes (houses or trailers) where they may have no air conditioning and rely on fans, which don't do much when it's 100+ out there. Or have an old air conditioner in just one window that barely blows any cold and that costs hundreds of dollars a month they don't have to run. And they live in neighborhoods that are anything but leafy and surrounded by conservation land. Dallas is mostly sunbaked. 

Then there are the homeless...

I also check the weather in Arizona. My sister Kath and her husband own a home in Tucson. They only use it during the fall, winter, and early spring months, when Tucson weather is lovely. But Tucson is the desert. Talk about sunbaked! Tucson makes Dallas look like Vermont. 

Fortunately, Kath and Rick don't have to spend the summer in Tucson. They decamp to relatively cool and absolutely leafier Massachusetts for the summer. 

I check on the weather in Phoenix, too. I'm not in contact with any of them, other than Christmas card exchanges with a couple of them, but I do have four first cousins and my one remaining aunt living in the Phoenix area. So I wonder how they're faring, and hoping they're okay. 

I know that Arizonans are used to hot summers. But there's hot, and then there's screaming emoji HOT. 

I've never been a big fan of hot (let alone HOT).

When I was a kid, I'd get overheated running around, and my parents would have to drag me in to cool down. At Sunday Mass during the summer months, there was always at least one Sunday a summer when I had to walk out of church at risk of fainting from the heat. (I don't recall that it was any cooler outside, but maybe the air was a little less close. In any case, there I'd be, standing outside until I felt well enough to come back in and plunk down in a pew.)

Fast forward, and I still don't do heat. I like summer for the light, but you can have the heat (and the humidity). If I had to pick heat or cold, cold always wins, mittened hands down. 

Boston has been having a bit of a heat and humidity spell. A couple of days when it even hit 90 degrees. (Plus drenching humidity.)

Nothing compares with the Southwest, but still right up there on my personal uncomfortable index.

I take my walks in the morning or evening, when it's marginally cooler. And I mostly restrict my pleasure/fitness walks to the leafy and verdant Boston Public Garden. I take my water bottle with me, make frequent stops to rest on park benches, and always hit the bubbler - that's New England for water fountain - to refill my bottle and drench my ballcap. 

When I get back in out of the heat - to my centrally air conditioned condo - I do the Aunt Carrie cool down tip: turn on the tap and run cold water over the insides of my wrists.

The other day, I had to go out mid-afternoon for my semi-annual teeth cleaning appointment. Oy! I had to stop every two minutes for a breather and, halfway home, having exhausted the water in my bottle, had to pop into a 7Eleven and buy me some Poland Spring.

I slogged home to do the Aunt Carrie trick, then hop into the shower.

When it comes to beating the heat, I am, of course, better off then most people. My home is cool. I can afford ample AC. There are plenty of days when I don't need to step toe out at all, other than for voluntary jaunteens around the Public Garden.

But I do get out several days a week to volunteer at St. Francis House. 

It's a short walk - maybe a half mile - and the walk is through the Boston Common. So, reasonably shady shade. (Not as good as the Public Garden provides, but pretty okay.) I'm typically heading in at about 6:45 a.m., so it's relatively cool. 

St. Francis House is in an old building, but the AC works pretty well. My volunteer work, however, is in the Resource Center, where my corner - although we have some sort of cool air blower - gets warm and stuffy, and the kitchen where - although we have fans - it's a kitchen, where we serve hot meals for hundreds at breakfast and lunch.

It's been pretty crowded of late. 

Some of the crowding is due to what appears to me to be an influx of young, desperate refugees from Haiti. But a lot of it is due to the heat. 

It's dangerous to be outside for very long in this weather, and St. Francis is cool, and the cold water never runs out. Every morning, we also provide showers, and our number of signups for showers has increased from 30-40 folks a day to 50+. 

When I think of the hot days when I blithely take a couple of showers, I realize how fortunate I am. And how good it feels to take those showers. For me, I "need" a shower because I've been out for a bit. For the folks who take showers at SFH, it's because they've been out in the elements for a while. They've made their way from the overnight shelter where they've slept - overnight shelters close in the morning; St. Francis is a day shelter - or from sleeping rough. Or from just being out sweltering. Sure, they can sit on a park bench as easily as I can, but even if you're in the shade, it's pretty hot just sitting there. So they come in to hang out where it's cool and where, if they want, they can take a shower. 

The news about the heat has been so alarming.

These relentless heat waves. The forest fires that come hand in glove. The bathwater/hot tub temperatures found in the ocean in the Atlantic Gulf. The destruction of the coral reefs. 

And yet we remain politically paralyzed when it comes to acknowledging that the world is heating up, and that our continued reliance on fossil fuels isn't helping any. Let alone when it comes to doing anything about it.

How does science become a culture war issue?

What's wrong with us???