Because it’s August and because it’s hot
Inspiration doesn’t seem to like the heat. Or maybe that I’ve been writing my blog since 2019. And sometimes I feel I don’t have anything new to say.
Yes, it’s hot. But it was also hot when I was a child. Probably not quite as hot but then there were other ways of beating the heat. I can see my sister and me running around naked under the lawn sprinkler. Even if someone had driven up to our farm at the end of the road, we were still just kids. Later when I wasn’t quite as innocent or young, I would get up at night to take a cold shower and return to bed, drops of water clinging to my adolescent body.
Then and now summers were often hot. Although maybe not as hot as now. As a college student hoping to make a bit of money, one year I worked as a waitress at a resort in Maine. The only time off we had was in the afternoon when we would go swimming in the ocean. In an ocean so cold you couldn’t stay in more than ten minutes. Thanks to the Labrador current.
Summers in New York were also hot and muggy with the asphalt returning the heat acquired during the day. The best way to cool off was to fill the bathtub in the kitchen of my cold water flat and sit there reading a book. Or perhaps make a jaunt to Coney Island after dark when the lights of the Ferris wheel and shooting galleries had been turned off. My friends and I would traipse over the sand and go skinny dipping in an ocean that was still miraculously clean. When we finally emerged, like Botticelli’s Venus, drops of diamonds, bioluminescence I later learned, rolled down our bodies.
Water and waves. How I would have loved to live on the coast in Italy but one can’t have everything. There were often breezes during the night from across the valley where the lights of the town and its cathedral vied with the fireflies in the woods that made me think of Tolkien’s fairies. The closest I could get was to make believe I was watching the waves break on the rocks off the California coast as I tacked up the poster with Eliot Porter’s photograph on my kitchen door.
And now? Not sure what I would do now, for air conditioning has replaced the poetry of the past. Although no one stops me from dreaming.
Erika Bizzarri 
You often lament that you can’t think of what to say, and then you come up with something like these “bioluminescent” stories! You are full of surprises: a Maine waitress’ tips for keeping cool, night skinny-dips cooling off in a formerly clean Coney Island ocean, cold water bathtub reading in the kitchen. Brava! And thanks for the impetus to look up “bioluminescence.” This septuagenarian says it’s never too late to learn such an exciting new word.👵—djc
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Gorgeous writing- especially “air conditioning has cancelled the poetry of the past.” Greetings from an equally hot August in Andalusia. — Alfredo & David
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In a North Carolina August that has been quite mild I love your memories and images of summer heat past. And the fireflies!! I still hope to visit Italy sometime soon! Meanwhile, keep your blogs blogging! Love you,
James II
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Such vivid memories Erika! And for me, living all my life in Britain, your recollections offer intriguing glimpses of summers in America. It rarely gets so hot in Old England. When it does, we rejoice in the sun – but we never go on holiday (take a vacation) without waterproofs and umbrellas. I do understand how, living most of your adult life inland in Italy, you have missed the sea: there is something about the vastness of the ocean and its uncontrollability that gets into the mind of a child and is never dislodged, isn’t there?
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