The Heat Is On

Well, summer is officially here and I have to confess, I’ve turned into a puddle of pathetic. It has been in the high 90s everyday for a couple of weeks, though mercifully it dips into the 80s at night. The whippoorwills are still around, but now they have to compete with the cicadas. The cicadas do not make me think of singing trees, but bear more of a resemblance to those vuvuzelas that have so recently hit the world stage.

But to be fair to the cicadas, this heat makes even the most benign things intolerable. Talking on the phone makes my ear sweat. I wash the dishes in cold water, because touching hot water makes me want to cry. Cooking? Ha! I felt like I accomplished a lot this afternoon because I made a jar of sun tea. For those northerners who don’t know about sun tea (I didn’t), it is a southern method of steeping tea where you put the tea in cold water, then set your jar in the sun for a couple hours, then refrigerate. Not complicated or taxing, but hey, it required walking.

I’m becoming more cantankerous every day this sweltering heat continues. And it’s only June.

I haven’t kept up with the garden very well, but I do try to get out there in the mornings before it gets too hellacious. The tomato plants and I apparently do not agree on what ideal weather conditions are, because they are racing to outgrow their trellises. The mustard greens and tatsoi are also shooting up, and our delicious dragon’s tongue beans are crunchy and gorgeous. The yellow crookneck squash plants are practically bursting out of their hills. If it weren’t for the garden, I would be an angry person. As it is though, I can tell myself as I sit in front of the oscillating fan that soon I will be eating the fruits of my labor and of this damn heat.

And it doesn't help my suffering that the Cantankerous Farmer isn't noticeably bothered by the heat. He just plugs away at his work like he always does. I don't even have company in my misery!

Speaking of fruit, on a more positive note, the blackberries are ripe. I ate my first bowl full yesterday, and plan to gorge as long as they’re here. Sweet, tart, and tasting of purple. I already have a gallon in the freezer. There are definitely blackberry cobblers and muffins in my future. In some distant future when using an oven is conceivable.

Besides sweating profusely and whining about it, I have been keeping busy with my graduate research, and have started reading a textbook to get ahead for the fall semester. I just finished the first chapter today, and I am now sure that I’m in exactly the right program. This is the concluding line of the first chapter to my Soils textbook: “If we take the time to learn the language of the land, the soil will speak to us.”

I know, in a textbook. It’s almost poetry.