Our Home is on Fire

I love Summer but it's not the same

Summer has long been my favorite season, going all the way back to Michigan when I was a child. Long days filled with sunshine. Long nights filled with mosquitoes. Finding ants inside peonies. Chasing fireflies. Picking raspberries. Eating blue gills fresh from the lake and fried in butter. Spitting watermelon seeds. Sticky fingers. Sticky skin. Peeling legs off furniture. Humidity.

Pink skin, tan lines, and sunburns. Days in the water; the lake or the pool. Afternoons in the park. Bar-b-ques and lawn chairs. Cold beers tucked in koozies and sweet tea perspiring in ice. Hot corn on the cob. Cold potatoes tossed with mayonnaise, cold pasta topped with veggies, cold cucumbers soaked in vinegar. The tinkling melody of the ice cream truck coming down the street. Popsicles, fudgsicles, creamsicles, and sandwiches. Root beer floats. Frizzy hair and flip flops. Rain showers.

The frequent banging of the screen door. And one thing I seem to not hear anymore: the rattle of big square fans.

Maybe where you are, there are fans. Maybe where you are, the heat is scorching. Over 65 million people in the U.S. Midwest and north-east are sweltering with temperatures reaching 100F and more. In India, the heat has risen above 121F and 49.9C. And in Saudi Arabia, hundreds have died during their pilgrimage to Mecca, with temperatures topping 51C and 124F. Perhaps you remember just two summers ago when an estimated 61,000 people died in Europe due to extreme heat.

Climate Change is Real.

Earlier this week, it was 51F in the Wood River Valley of Idaho. Tomorrow it will be 89.

I don’t have any answers. Every day I drive my gasoline-powered car, I feel guilty. Each flight on a plane, I know is bad. Yet here we are. Most of us recycling our paper and cardboard, reducing our consumption of single-use plastic, watering our lawns and gardens and night, carrying water bottles during the day, using LED lightbulbs and energy-efficient appliances. Still, here we are.

Our home is on fire.

I can’t help thinking of the frogs in water experiment. The frogs that jump out to safety when placed in boiling water while those in the water that gradually increases in heat, stay. The acclimate until they are dead.

This is not a happy post.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe. I hope you are drinking lots of purified water (but not from plastic). I hope you can rest more than you work. I hope a breeze comes through your windows. I hope you have a fan.