Hot and quiet

After the party and after Elise left us, it has been a good work week.  Too hot to do much in the garden except pick a bit.  We have to get outside very early if we’re to do anything, but that isn’t always possible. I’ve been writing poems, four since things got quiet here and I also revised three I’d written recently.  I am probably happiest when writing poetry. PM Press may be interested in publishing a collection of my short stories.  Some of them I haven’t look at in years and years, so I have been revising a couple to see how they feel. Some of them I have to find – not in any obvious place.  It’s unsettling not to know where they are, but Wednesday, I will start looking hard for them.  I won’t revise any more until I hear from Ramsey at PM if he really wants to publish them, and what the time line would be.  If he is truly interested, I think I’ll write a couple of new ones. I have one idea buzzing around in my brain already.  I have to write that one before I have any peace, so on to it. It’s almost time to start getting ready for Omega.  Omega’s a retreat center near Rhinebeck New York in the Hudson River valley on a lake in a hilly region.  We teach what we call personal narrative there the first weekend in August every year – memoir, autobiographical fiction included.  Everyone who takes the course goes onto a Ning so they can post their writing after the class concludes and get feedback. We’ve been teaching the course for over a decade, but every year we treak it a bit. I know we’re lucky and it’s not nearly as hot here as on the mainland, and Massachusetts is not nearly as hot as the Midwest or Southwest, but still it has been quite hot and quite humid.  I have friends who adore hot humid weather and have moved to Florida or Georgia to enjoy it. I am someone who mostly loves spring and fall.  My brain stops working over eighty degrees.  Without airconditioning, I doubt I would get much done in the summer. When I was growing up, we did not have air conditioning.  Hell, when I was a kid, we didn’t have a refrigerator.  We had an icebox.  The iceman would come twice a week in his wagon pulled by a tired old horse and bring a big cube of ice that went into the icebox in the basement.  The icebox was a handsome wooden object where the ice went into a compartment in the top and there were two other compartments for food.  The neighborhood kids, including me, begged pieces of ice to suck. I remember when we got our first refrigerator.  The cooling apparatus sat on top of the whole thing and it was noisy and much smaller than anything but those small office refrigerators today. When we traveled in hot weather, my mother would insist on buying a piece of ice that we would put our feet on in the front seat. Bench seats were all that existed then.  Our car was old and the melting water drained from a small hole in the floor.It was so hot sometimes in hotel rooms and my mother and I would take a cold bath in the middle of the night. We put in zone air conditioning two years ago as a response to the obvious climate change that has removed us already from Zone 6 growing season to Zone 7.  We have three units and cool only the rooms that need it most and only turn on the unit where we are working or hanging out.  One of the units came free because of they are also heat pumps and are energy efficient, so we got a rebate.  How it improved our lives I cannot emphasize sufficiently. I could not write in this weather without it, let alone cook.  Our kitchen is a hotbox and I almost passed out two Augusts ago, which is when we decided to do something about the heat.  I love airconditioning.