Just kidding. I’m not counting anything. It’s too hot. The end of summer can’t come soon enough. During these long, slow, steamy days, the skunk vine invading our back yard grows better than ever while the confetti of impatiens droop in the shade—and I’m not going outside to do anything about it. Right now, it’s 95, feels like 105.  I used to be able to stand the heat. Throughout my thirties, I walked 4-6 miles several times a week in all kinds of weather.  I can’t stand to walk to my car anymore.

As a child, I practically lived outside.  My brothers and I spent afternoons and evenings at our grandparents’ house in Orlando.  They didn’t have air conditioning.  They had one fan—a big black wire cage tabletop fan with four fat blades that whirred.  I’d stand in front of it and say “Ooooh” so that I could hear my voice chopped into segments– vibrating, as far I knew.  “Don’t put your hand in there,” my grandparents would say.  I wonder: Did I look that dumb to them?  

We’d hide or run farther down the street when our grandmother called for us at dusk, knowing she would never come after us. We played in the woods with the neighborhood kids, in the deep drainage ditches wider than a car, in the small ditches lining the dirt road on both sides, and in the shopping center one street away. Barefoot, usually.  We’d have to run fast across the asphalt parking lot if we weren’t wearing shoes.  I learned how and where to step in the woods so that I didn’t get cut by a sharp stick or a rock– or broken glass.  (We weren’t the first to play in those woods.)

When we were hungry, we picked oranges and guavas and sometimes stole grapes growing on a fence at the house of an old couple no one knew.  The grapes were always hard and sour.  But the oranges, plain-old Valencias with dark fungus on the outside and sometimes brown webbing on the peel, were always good.  We washed the fungus off with the garden hose and retrieved from the ground behind my grandfather’s shed the small kitchen knife we snuck outside.  We’d cut the oranges in half and turn them inside out and let the juices run down as we ate them, then wash off with the hose.  No one tended the orange trees in my aunt’s yard just behind my grandparents’ house, and yet they were perfect. 

A gigantic pecan tree towered over my aunt’s house.  We helped her gather the nuts when they fell, filling paper grocery bag after bag with them, but we didn’t rely on them for our snacks.  Too much work shelling them.  We were happy to stick with oranges.  The same with her sugar cane. It was just too much work trying to saw off a piece with that kitchen knife.

Thunder is booming overhead right now, reminding me that we played in the rain and made mud pies and didn’t care that lightning could strike.  I wasn’t aware of my mortality in any meaningful way as an eight year-old. I thought thunder and lightning were exciting.  Except if we were inside, sitting on the screened porch, feeling a mist of rain blow in.  Somehow I felt less protected then, like lightning might actually stab through the screen and zap me. 

Which is not to say that no one ever got hurt. 

Once, a group of us kids went fishing at a pond down past the end of the street, some fishing, some only watching.  We must have been behaving exactly as you would expect a group of unsupervised kids would behave.  But still, the accident could have happened if there had only been two kids there.  One boy whipped his pole behind him to cast out and caught his younger brother in the cheek with a three-pronged fish hook. Chaos ensued, but we did all get the heck out of there, running ahead of the brothers going home so their mother, a nurse, could handle it.  The rest of us went inside our houses and hid.  Their mother was just as mad as we feared.  

This afternoon rain hasn’t cooled things down a bit. In fact, it’s even muggier and the windows are fogging up. I would like to drop off from this heat and settle into a cool October autumn day where I open the windows and bake something made with apples and cinnamon.  I’d even settle for September and the breezes it brings that take the edge off the heat and lighten things up a bit.  I’m going to turn the AC down a touch, maybe to 72, grab my sofa throw, and take a nap.  Maybe I will dream it’s already Christmas and I’m with my husband and children, and their children and wives, snow piled high, sleds ready to go.  That really is what Christmas and the New Year hold for me.  I booked that trip back in May.  It was already sweltering here.