“Don’t run Clop’s legs off,” my daughter told my granddaughter. Lauren had brought Myah to me to watch while Momma ran some errands. Myah is newly five years old and has found that her grandfather’s house is the “House Of The Rising Yes.” We promptly set off on a game of Tag on the front lawn that an 85-degreee heat was trying to burn. The month of May left us with a signature of fire.
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and at an early age, I learned to navigate through snow and cold. In 1970, I left Pittsburgh for California, a state that I adored for eight years. When I was transferred by my company to Indiana, I landed here in 1978. The state was still in shock from the Blizzard of ‘78 and residents I met regaled me with horror stories of snow and cold. “Yeah,” I would reply, “I’m from Pittsburgh, soo…” I was born in cold and raised on ice, but I hate them both. I want the hot and humid (though that was sorely tested when I spent three weeks in Clearwater Beach Florida one July). I joke that I can take off enough clothes to get cool but can never pile on enough to get warm. People question my wearing of gloves in early September, but few know that my hands were frostbitten in Pittsburgh when my brother and I, while attempting to earn money shoveling snow, were hired to shovel that snow from the front, back and side of a hotel that filled a city block. We walked approximately 2 miles from our house to the hotel. Our uncle was the janitorial manager for the hotel, and he directed us toward the task. Years later, it seemed, we had shoveled snow from the entire state of Pennsylvania and walked back home. My mother soaked our frozen feet in cool water, but I still lose circulation in my fingers when my hands are exposed to the cold. So, yeah: Gimme heat.
June is busting out all over and the weather people on the TV stations are telling us that we will have a hot time in the old town. 90-degree temperatures are being predicted for the first week of June, temperatures that have historically been recorded later in the month. In summer, I hit the road with a water bottle and a sweat rag. But I do recognize the human contribution to what the rock band The Kinks sang as “a change in the weather.” Our existence on the Big Blue Marble has an impact. Every step we take imprints upon and alters the landscape we traverse, and many of those steps have contributed toward the changes in our weather. Indiana has been suffering from drought-like temperatures and a lack of precipitation. I am sensitive to the harm that those conditions can bring, and on some days, I will sing as The Temptations did: “Oh how I wish that it would rain…” And while I do admire the beauty of the turning of the leaves, I fear the advent of cold weather. When the leaves start to fall, I think of all the days that I spent sliding down icy hillsides in my leather-soled shoes (I was a fashionable idiot, too “fly” to buy boots), my gloved hands stuffed into the pockets of my full-length leather coat and know that I would rather fry than freeze.
When the weather forecasters point at the upper regions of the thermometer, I will sing as Nina Simone did: “Here comes the sun, little darling… It’s all right.”
cjon3acd@att.net