Summer Heat Wave

June 21!  The first day of summer.  I love the heat today, although I don’t usually love the heat.  I’m going to be indoors, but there is something about stepping into the hot, humid fogginess of a summer morning.  This year we have beans in the fields around the house, so at least we won’t be simmering in our stew pot this year.  Corn across the road in the front to the south – more than knee high for sure.  I was thinking about the time period when corn would be “knee high by the Fourth of July” this morning, and the labor-intensive task it must have been to get the fields plowed and planted.  And then I let the thought slip away as I drove down the road, into my morning.

I find myself slipping into that “I wonder what it was like” mindset more and more frequently as our house comes down around my ears slowly, slowly.  I have had the same living room curtains for 24 years.  I finally ordered some new ones about a week ago, and was discussing this with Diana yesterday.  Twenty-four years. Twenty-four years ago, when we bought the house, my son had not even been conceived yet.  Twenty-four years ago, the house had been newly remodeled, patched, papered, painted,  and put up for sale.

The lady of the house told me, “You’ll really love the spring, here.”  At the time, I thought she meant that I’d love the gradual warming, the bulbs breaking free of the soil, the grass turning green in response to the gentle soaking rains of the new season.  I think, in hindsight, she meant that I’d love the spring because the house, 125 years old at the time of the sale, was full of holes, and mice, and the wind blowing through doors that had settled out of whack, and windows that barely held their track.

We have made repairs as we could, but still, the wind has flipped the shingles off one by one, or in pairs.  The rain has entered despite the caulk, despite the new shingles, the patches and repairs.  And finally the roof suffered its worst blow last October, when a branch plummeted from a tree that doesn’t even hang over the house pierced the roof of the second story and made its home in our second story bedroom.

It took forever to settle with the insurance company, which rejected the first roofing bid, taking just enough time to take us into the coldest, wettest part of winter.  The flashing patch covering the hole on the outside has been very reliable.  Inside, I installed a plastic sheet over the hole to keep the winter winds out while I waited for repairs.

I think, sometimes, that it would be better to be someone who calls an outsider on the phone for repairs.  I am, instead, someone with just enough talent in the repair business to know that my husband or I can do the job much more inexpensively (okay – cheaply) than if we hire it out.  Not more quickly, though.  That’s why there is still a hole through my bedroom ceiling, and the roof still needs a major overhaul.

Yesterday, in the hottest part of the day, I turned a fan outward facing to pull the hot air out of the upstairs.  Unfortunately, this also means that any hot air that has accumulated in the usually closed off rafter space is sucked into the bedroom before it is pulled out of the house.  As I walked through the down-draft of superheated air, I had one of the those flashbacks to the past, and I felt older, much older.

There’s a certain smell to attic air; an old smell that stirs emotions:  Acrid, yet full of memories.  Hot attic air leaves you no choice but to think back to the times Dad let you join him in the attic – up the pull down ladder – and into the world of possibilities.  Every box held things I never seen before, or things I had forgotten that I had seen before.  Things like dusty, plastic leis and fishnets saved for another luau. I ask if I can have the starfish, but it is attached to the net with some ferocious glue and wire.  There are boxes of Christmas decorations, exotic in the summer heat, and Mr. Big Bunny (a six-foot stuffed Easter Bunny my brother won and aptly named when he was two during an Easter egg hunt) sits patiently in the corner for the day when we will give up on bringing him down.

Mr. Big Bunny stirred a variety of feelings in each of us:  he scared David when he won him, and the rest of us show our disdain and jealousy by alternately teasing David, and then the bunny.  Mom had made large, brightly patterned clothes for Mr. Big Bunny, and washed the dust out of them each spring when dad brought him down from his home in the attic.  She’d sew the buttons back on each year until at the end he had four different buttons for each hand-stitched buttonhole.  I think Mr. Big Bunny ended up, like most outgrown things from our childhoods, in the big dumpster dad rented when we moved from Palos to Mundelein.

In the attic, which is nicely organized into boxes on shelves, Dad would locate the box that he needed, and tell me (and usually one of my brothers), that it was time to go downstairs.  I frantically looked around for one of the treasures to take down with me – maybe a paper lantern or a broken string of party lights.  In the end, Dad made me climb down the ladder empty handed, or with a dusty lei around my neck.

June 22, 2010. I need to repair the hole, and have decided last night during the worst part of the storm to start this weekend.