Heat Wave

This week's Journal will deal a lot with temperature. All week long, I focused a lot of attention, even more than I usually do, on the thermometer. Happily, I was not watching and worrying about frost for once. Last week was hot. We had a heat wave. Our average high temperature here in Potter County is 78.5°, and it usually comes in the middle of July. We exceeded that by a wide margin last week in the middle of June. I have three thermometers that I watch. One is on the back porch. I keep it there because I keep plants there part of the year and I have to know when they are in danger of freezing. Another is on the wall on the outside of the back porch above the stairs. I keep that one because my aunts always had one there. It is old and the numbers are faded, but the mercury, actually it is red alcohol, rises and falls just fine. The third thermometer is the high tech one on the little weather station out in the garden on top of the birdhouse post between the kiwis and the rhubarb. It broadcasts the temperature to a display in my bedroom. It records outdoor and indoor temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction, humidity, and keeps track of high and low statistics for the last week, month, and year.

The back porch thermometers, inside and outside.

My weather station outside, and the inside display.

I monitor the temperature in Fahrenheit. I know that most of the rest of the world uses Celsius. The only countries that still officially use Fahrenheit are the United States, some Caribbean countries, and Liberia. Even in the U.S. there is a push to switch to Celsius. If we ever do, I will be lost. I can't wrap my head around Celsius. When I watch British shows and they talk about the weather, I scoff. They complain when the temperature rises to 32°. That's freezing to me. But in Fahrenheit that's 89.6° and the average high temperature in the UK is just 13°C. or 55°F. And when Mary Berry instructs me to bake a cake at 160°, I think she's had one too many sips of cooking sherry. It's Fahrenheit all the way for me.

Last Sunday evening, I went down at 9:30 to close the barn for the night. On hot days I prop open the upper door and one of the lower doors that I've covered with a screen so that air can circulate. I close them at night so that curious nocturnal creatures won't be tempted to visit. It was still twilight, that deep purple time when the stars are just emerging. It was 78°, a very warm nighttime temperature for us. The grass was damp with dew. I took off my shoes and took the long way back to the house. I think I'm beginning to like going barefoot enough to overcome my childhood training. I know now that, contrary to what my mother told us as children, you don't automatically get worms from going barefoot. As I walked through the garden, there were thousands of fireflies blinking in the tall grass in the orchard and meadow. The air was still and heavy with humidity. It was a perfect summer evening. Before I went to bed, I opened some windows to let the night air in. There was a time when that would have been considered dangerous. Until well into the 20th century, night air was thought by many to be full of noxious vapors, a miasma (from the Greek miasmatos, μιασματος, meaning pollution, or a harmful contagious power). I love nights mild enough to keep the windows open. I find the night air soothing.

Monday morning when I dressed for the day, I donned my only pair of shorts again. It had cooled off a little during the night, but I knew it was going to be a hot day. When I went down before dawn to open the barn, it was 68°. As soon as the sun was up over the hill, things heated up quickly. By 10:00 a.m. the temperature was at 87° and still climbing. Even though we'd had a lot of rain, I knew that the raised beds in my vegetable garden, which dry out faster than the ground, would need watering. So I spent an hour with the garden hose, giving each bed a deep soaking. By then I was soaking wet with sweat. Hauling around a 150 foot long hose full of water is hard work, especially in the heat. After that, I needed to take a little siesta – not a full-blown nap, just a bit of quiet resting in the shade.

My friends Pat and Terry Mann brought down the last of this year's chicks to me that morning. These are month old chicks that Pat hatched from eggs she got from someone who raises some interesting breeds. Some of them are Cuckoo Marans, some are Swedish Flower, some are Easter Eggers. They will add some nice variety to my flock. I really appreciate Pat helping me rebuild my flock after the mink massacre. She likes to do the part of raising chickens that I don't like to do – the period from hatching to a month old. We're done with chicks for now. With these last eleven, my flock is back to thirty-four birds. I don't know how many of the newer ones are roosters yet. And the ones that are hens won't start laying eggs until late in the year or maybe next spring. Thanks Pat!

I was worried about the pigs coping with the heat. They'd dug some pits to rest in and started a mud wallow. I put a wading pool in the pigpen, thinking they'd like it. They thought it was interesting at first. They smelled it and nibbled on the edges of it. They put their front legs in it, but that's all the further they went in. Instead, they decided to try flipping it over. Later in the day, they finally figured it out and spent the rest of the afternoon lounging in the pool. They splash a lot and displace a lot of water, so I have to fill it several times a day.

Making a mud wallow.

At noon we hit 92° and we stayed there until evening. It was too hot to work outdoors. I tried, twice, to go out and do something not too strenuous, just pull a few weeds. I only lasted five minutes each time. I knew that if I went any longer, it would make me sick. Those Southern California days when triple digits didn't faze me are long gone. I retreated to the house to wait for the evening. Our house is not air conditioned. It doesn't get hot enough often enough to warrant it. We rely on windows, fans, and maple trees to keep the inside of the house cooler than the outside and it's usually good enough. This time it wasn't. It was barely tolerable indoors.

All day long I had Cole Porter's song It's Too Darn Hot running through my head. I love Ella Fitgerald's version of it, but here's the scene from 1953's Kiss Me Kate where the amazing Ann Miller performs it while tap dancing in high heels.

When Stacey got home from work, Sarah and Tosh came over to help put up drywall. With the house so hot, it was extra hard work. After the sun went down, I went out and watered a few things that are always thirsty, cucumbers, and the potted plants on the back porch steps. The evening cooled to 78° and it was lovely. Inside the house, however, it did not cool down. It was 85° indoors when I went to bed. We had windows open, but there was no breeze outside, so it didn't help much. I tossed and turned most of the night. Around 3:00 a.m. I was awakened by the odor of skunk wafting through the open windows. I don't know if it was a skunk or an animal that had been sprayed by a skunk lurking around the house. I thought if I could get a reverse air flow going out the windows instead of in, it would help. We didn't have any fans running, so I got up and turned on the ceiling fan in the dining room and the box fan in the living room. It worked. After a few minutes the smell had dissipated enough for me to go back to sleep.

Working on drywall.

Tuesday morning was lovely. Going out into the dewy world, I could hardly believe that the previous day had been so hot. I went down and opened the barn, checked on the new chicks, and fed them all their breakfast. Next I went to the pigpen and filled up their pool and refreshed their mud wallow. The pigs were still in bed in the straw in their hut. They are late sleepers and only get up early if they know I've brought them something to eat. As I came back to the house, I could already feel the sun heating things up. Tuesday was my regular haircut appointment. I keep my hair cut pretty short, but this time the heat tempted me to get it buzzed off. But then I remembered that I look terrible with buzzed hair, and resisted the temptation.

Tuesday afternoon we hit 92° again. This time there was a breeze, but it didn't make much difference. It was still too hot to work outdoors all day. It's funny that in a short time, I've gone from waiting for it to be warm enough to work outdoors, to waiting for it to be cool enough. I finally went out at 8:00 p.m. to water wilted plants. After the sun went down, the evening was cool and delicious.

The heat wave was supposed to break on Wednesday, but it took its time. When I went out before dawn, it was a dewy 68°. The sunrise was beautiful. I knew there was weather coming. The forecast called for thunderstorms in the afternoon and then rainy weather until Sunday. I hurried and cut the lawn as soon as the dew was gone. It was still hot, 88°, but I had to get it done before the rain came. When I finished, I came in and got a drink and took a nap on the living room couch in front of the fan. I know why people in hot countries take a siesta midday. 

On my morning walk.

On my morning walk. That's a beaver swimming in the pond.

On my morning walk.

Finally, at 3:30, just as I was coming up from the barn after doing the chores, the wind shifted, clouds moved in, and it rained. The temperature dropped to 76°, but humidity rose to 98%. The smell of the rain, the freshly cut grass, and the wet dust from the road was a perfect summer perfume. I went out and sat on the front porch to watch the rain and listen to it drumming on the metal roof. It lasted for half an hour and then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again.

Wednesday evening was a Relief Society activity at the chapel. Stacey, Hannah, and Miriam were there and it was a dinner, so I had to fend for myself. I didn't feel like cooking anything. The house was too warm for me to want to make anything more complicated than a quesadilla. I was going to go outside to eat, but it was raining again, so to entertain myself while I ate my quesadilla, I tried to watch a Japanese sitcom. After decades of letting my Japanese slide, I started doing Duolingo several years ago to brush up on it. I have an unbroken 682 day streak! And even after all of that, I hardly understood anything. They talked fast. They used slang. I caught the occasional word. I had no idea what was going on or why it was supposed to be funny. It was disheartening. After one episode, I gave up watching. It had stopped raining by then, so I went outside and took out my linguistic frustrations by deadheading poppies. The sunset was very pretty. All the color was in the east, not the west, which was odd, but beautiful.

Sunset on Wednesday.

Thursday morning was cool and foggy. The heat wave was over. It was 65° when I went out in the morning. That morning, I had a snatch of the song Heat Wave stuck in my head. It was just the lines:

We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.

The temp'rature's rising, it isn't surprising.

She certainly can, can-can.

I couldn't remember where I knew it from and I had to figure it out. The song was written by Irving Berlin for the 1933 musical As Thousands Cheer and it was sung by Ethel Waters. Lots of other people did versions of it. It was used again in 1946 in the movie Blue Skies, and There's No Business Like Show Business in 1954 (where it was sung rather sexily by Marilyn Monroe). Ella Fitzgerald recorded a great version of it. But those weren't the ones I was thinking of. I finally realized where I knew it from. In the movie White Christmas, there is a musical montage showing Wallace and Davis's rise to fame and in it there is a twelve second clip of Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye singing just those lines from the song. 

It was hazy and still all day. We reached 82°, warm, but not roasting hot. It rained off and on in short spells, all day, but that didn't stop me from working. First, I made my initial inspection of the gardens, forming a prioritized list of things that needed to be done. The heat wave was hard on the late spring annuals. It hastened their demise. The common poppies, foxgloves, cornflowers, and lupines are in rapid decline now and want to set seed. I want their seed, so I won't deadhead them anymore. The June roses think it's high summer already and have begun to shut down their display. With the passing of these, the garden will hit a drab spell. The high summer flowers aren't ready yet. There will be tall phlox and zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, and dahlias eventually, but the garden will be mostly green for a while. My tasks that morning were easy. I staked up a few tomatoes. I weeded the raised beds. I tied sweet peas onto their support poles. It was nice to work outdoors without worrying about heatstroke.

In the afternoon after chores, I went out to the big garden and picked strawberries. Our strawberry season is winding down now, but I found enough to fill a bowl. The fragrance of strawberries ripe and warm in the sun is heavenly. I think they might smell better than they taste, and they taste pretty good.

Friday was a gloomy day, cloudy, and a lot cooler. The heat wave was definitely over. It was a perfect morning for snail hunting and I gathered plenty of them. I had errands to run, a trip to the Amish bulk food store and feed store, and then a trip to Wellsville to buy chicken feed and return books to the library. So I spent most of the morning in the car, which was fine, the weather being what it was. By the time I got home and unloaded everything, it was lunchtime. After lunch I went out to work. It looked like rain might start at any moment. While I was working, Kurt came over and reported that potato beetles had been spotted out in the big garden. I went with him to investigate. Sure enough, there they were, larvae and adult beetles. We went down the row squishing any we found with our fingers. Kurt said the children are good at finding them and catching them in cups of soapy water. That will be a daily job we will assign to them from now on. 

Friday dinner was our traditional homemade pizza. Hannah makes excellent pizza. After dinner, Stacey and I went to the movies. We went to see Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. It was part two of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning released in 2023. I didn't really remember what happened in that one, so we watched it on Thursday night to refresh our memories. Those movies all tend to blur into a long string of  over-the-top stunts. The Final Reckoning is the most action-packed, crazy stunt filled one of them all. We enjoyed it.

Saturday we spent most of the morning helping the Fosters over in their house next door. They are hoping to move into it in a few weeks and it still needs a lot of work. The cellar is cleaned out. Tosh worked on the ceilings in the living room during the week. We helped load things to take to the dump and relocated things that were stored there to other locations. Work is coming along there bit by bit.

Saturday was Grant Shillig's ninth birthday, so dinner was a celebration over at the Shillig's house. Grant is Kurt and Julie's son Chase's youngest child. We had pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, mosquito salad, and rolls. Miriam made the birthday cake. Sunset was beautiful.

Miriam, Grant, and the birthday cake.

Sunset on Saturday.

Today is a very pretty summer Sabbath day.  Church went well. Stacey and I were the speakers in sacrament meeting. We assign speakers by moving down the branch list alphabetically and in a branch our size, that means you get to speak three or four times a year. Our talks went well. During the second hour, because this is a fifth Sunday, we practiced some of the new hymns. Now we're home and lunch will be ready soon. It is a fine warm day. I'm planning on a nap after lunch and perhaps a walk later toward evening.

We've come to the end of June already. It treated us to a summer heat wave in the very first days of summer. I hope that wasn't the last summer heat we'll have. The week ahead is supposed to be warm, but not hot. Friday is Independence Day, a holiday that, in my mind, seems to come in the middle of summer, although the season is really only fourteen days old. I love the 4th of July. I love the food. I love the fireworks. I love celebrating the freedom we are blessed with in this great nation, freedom created by the wisdom of great men and women and won and maintained by the blood and sacrifice of heroic patriots. I hope you have a safe and glorious 4th.