HOT AND BOTHERED!

Before the rains came in late June, the heat was inexorable; it permeated absolutely everything. The break of morning started off at a foreboding eighty degrees, before the sun made its brutal ascent. The sand and the rocks trapped so much warmth that they continued to radiate it long after the sun had gone down. They never ever truly cool down, not until late December perhaps.

Imagine this. You wake up outdoors and plot the course of your day’s activities around the menacing heat of midday, when the mercury climbs as high as 114 degrees. Ice is the first item on the agenda. You don’t bother to change out of your pajamas, because you don’t have any, and there is no shame in wearing the same outfit day after day here. You drop by your neighbor’s homefront boutique and purchase a block of ice that is about the size of two baseballs for a dime. You go home and pour filtered water on it and quaff. There is a danger in consuming unfiltered water in the form of ice, but it’s a risk that’s worth taking. Chugging water that’s eighty or ninety degrees is difficult and unsatisfying. You continue to drink long after your thirst is quenched. The thirst will return soon anyhow.

As I write this, in late September, it is still hot and sunny by all means, but it isn’t nearly so brutal. Now we are treated to occasional cloud coverage and wind! Back in May all we got was a gentle breeze. Like somebody was holding a hairdryer in front of me.

Nowadays, due to the lower temps and occasional rains, mosquitos are able to proliferate. They couldn’t thrive in the constant, blistering sauna that was May and early June. That is the single, solitary, one-and-only upside to the whole hellish inferno: virtually no pests.

Unfortunately, vegetables couldn’t take the heat either, so the selection of food available in our market diminished. I also couldn’t find eggs (an important source of protein) in boutiques around that time, probably because they cooked themselves and rotted just sitting on the shelf. People don’t refrigerate them.

Normally I like to go jogging in the countryside. I enjoy it so much that I don’t mind wearing a long skirt and a head covering while I do it. But in May and June I perspired excessively in my sleep! There was nary a dry moment, so forget about working up a sweat intentionally.

I recall noting that water boiled in about five seconds flat back then. Even water coming out of the tap felt searing hot. Pouring water onto myself for a bucket bath did not produce the simple comfort that it does at this time.

The heat altered the texture of everything. Gels seemingly lost their viscosity, even shelled chocolate melted. I got a heat rash on my scalp! The heat abated my appetite. It was very easy to get by on just a little nasty food. I didn’t feel hunger like before. Only while eating I began to realize how hungry I had been. The next sensation I felt was being uncomfortably full.

Today is the first day of fall, and somewhere out there, that means something to somebody. But here, we’ve still got sun, sun sun! It’ll stay quite hot, though not eyeball-fryingly so, until late November. At least the worst part is over!