One day of hot weather and
I’m ready to climb the walls with discomfort.
It’s my own damn fault. I’m the
one who originally said, “Oh, let’s put the air conditioners in the windows
before it gets hot on Mother’s Day … Never mind. It’s only going to last for one day.”
Seriously, though, this
logic is flawless: It really is only going to be hot for about twenty
hours. Big deal. It’s not like we’re in a heat wave or
anything. Why should I haul the a/c
units upstairs, get them all loaded in the window, and then freeze when the
temperature drops later this week and the poor insulation around the a/c
mounting causes me to turn the heat back on?
That’s the kind of crazy
behavior I reserve for the fall.
I immediately regret my
decision when I attempt to sleep. This “sleep”
stuff lasts about two minutes until, even with the fan blasting, I feel like my
skin is melting off. I run downstairs
and grab a washcloth, which I drench in cold water, then I return to my bedroom
and drape the damp fabric over my forehead.
This helps for about ten minutes before I start fidgeting from the heat
all over again.
All night long I’m up, I’m
down, I’m sweaty, I’m chilly, I’m having nightmares, the fan isn’t cooling the
room down, or I’m just generally unsettled.
I piece together a few horrible hours of shut-eye.
In the morning, it is
still sticky and disgusting outside. It’s
not pea-soup level humidity, but my antiperspirant is working double-time
today. I throw open the windows at school,
attempting to melt away the hot weekend air that is stuck inside the building.
Then something turns. All of a sudden around noontime, the air
outside becomes chilly. Cold, even. By the time I get home, though, the second
floor of my house is still an oven. I
put some fans in windows and hope for the best.
My son’s room is missing
the window fan. He took the fan to
school with him in the fall, and I cannot find it by peeking into his
room. Actually, I cannot find much of
anything looking in his room because it looks like a post-college-dorm
explosion in there. I briefly toy with
the idea of grabbing one of the two large box fans from the downstairs areas
and bringing them up to his room, but I cannot bring myself to do it.
Those are special fans;
those are fans that cannot be moved by anyone except me.
Those are my menopause
fans. Those are my “oh my god please
someone help me anyone help me I’m having a hot flash right this very second
and I’m going to kill something” fans. If
I lose those fans, I’ll lose my mind, and nobody wants mama losing her mind
when she is within arm’s reach of sharp knives in the kitchen.
Finally, the kid gets home
from the meeting he had to attend. He
finds the small window-sized box fan amongst his paraphernalia, props it into
his window, and pretty soon the upstairs will be an almost sleep-able
temperature. I don’t have to lose my
menopause fans, and I don’t even have to explain why I would rather have fans
readily available for my comfort level then to have them available for my loved
ones.
Hey, I adore my kids, but
try and reason with a middle-aged woman in the throes of a hot flash. I dare you to do it. And then, when you wake from your coma five
days later with a severe skull injury, maybe it will
have cooled down enough
for you to recuperate in your room after the doctors release you from the ICU.
So, for the safety of everyone
and for my sanity, please warn me the next time it’s going to be in the
mid-to-high eighties. I’ll drag those
damn air conditioners right out from their hiding spot under the cellar stairs
and put them in the windows myself if I have to because I’m not spending another
night trying to sleep with a washcloth on my face in this Easy Bake Oven of a
house.
