Summer in Virginia

July and August in central Virginia bring blast-furnace days. When that blast-furnace covers other states it becomes newsworthy and people begin uttering phrases like “heat dome”. Heat dome? Is that Newspeak for heat wave? Whatever, it gets brutal. Oppressive. Dangerous. This is heat that kills people.

This morning’s heat index was at 119° F (48° C) by noon. The real air temperature reached 102° by 3 PM. That’s 102° in the shade. Add sweltering humidity so your perspiration doesn’t easily evaporate and you’ve got a recipe for heat stroke.

The temperature in my upstairs guest rooms reached 100° by afternoon. I keep the air conditioner off upstairs as there is no one living in that space. I’ll be honest; it felt much hotter than 100° up there.

Downstairs in the air conditioned living room the a/c unit struggled, running full time to hold the temperature at a balmy 80°.

The heat reminds me of a summer I spent in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was working my way through college and trying to save every dime, so I rented a room at an old boarding house. There was no air conditioning and my room was on the top floor under a metal roof and directly above the kitchen, which prepared dozens of meals for boarders and guests all day. “Hot” did not describe that room. It was a sauna. It was a lie-naked-on-the-bedsheets-and-sweat room. And because the house had only one bathroom for each floor, even a cool shower was often not an option. I’ll quit writing now, before people get the notion I’m complaining. Stay cool, peeps.