06.29.05 - 5:36 p.m.

Weather.com tells me that it is 92�F outside, but that it "feels like" 96�F and that, although it is partly cloudy, I can see for nine miles if I just look hard enough. Nine miles: maybe the ring of hills hazy in the distance really are that close. I certainly can't see much beyond them. The gukky gray haze has obliterated the plume of steam from the power plant 40ish miles away usually visible over the ridgeline with all the cell phone towers and radio antennas on the east-south-east horizon.

I mind the heat. I don't like being shut up in the house. I miss the open windows and the birds, etc., the sense that - even with four walls and a roof and a certain tendency toward isolation - I'm connected to a wider world. For some reason, when it's warm but not hot and the windows are all thrown open, and the curtains are open and the doors and I'm walking around barefoot and the boundaries between indoors and outdoors are blurred by all the light and birds and fresh air and crickets and the hum of the interstate or the rat-tat-tat of a helicopter passing over on its way to the hospital and whatnot, I feel like I'm on a semi-permanent vacation, even when I'm working everyday. I loved spring and early summer, all of it, until the first 90+ heatwave descended on us. Now we're in hte middle of the second, and I can't live without air conditioning blasting me into a state of near permafrost on days like this.

Last night I spent an hour working in the yard. It was twilight - the sun was mostly hidden by the line of the houses across the street, sinking below the hills, so it wasn't beating down on me. I didn't bother with my hat or sunglasses: the shadows were long and muted and they weren't necessary - really, they would have been a hindrance. Still, it was insanely hot; sweltering even. I weeded the front beds and the impatiens [like everyone, I want to say impatients, the plants that just can't wait to grow] on the side of the house, watered the pots on the deck and the front porch, the front perennial beds (because, while weeding, I noticed that the shrub on which I spent so much money was looking straggly from lack of water. Most of the rest of the perennials there seem pretty well-established, surprisingly enough, and didn't really need the water, but the itea and maybe the bellflower were parched, with curled leaves, drooping, crepey flowers and slumping stems).

I watered the tomatoes and peppers too, and all the annuals I have out in the yard, then and gathered up some yard waste - weeds from the front, mostly, and some of the ivy I pulled up from the hostas and sedum in the back for the trash. The work was pleasant, not at all strenuous, in what should be the cool of the evening (I was weeding at dusk, crouching in the front, finding the weeds by texture more than sight because the shadows were so long, but by the time I finished watering in the tomatoes and pots of herbs on the deck full night had fallen). When I went back inside to finish cooking dinner, though, I was still covered in a sheen of sweat.

I ate outside anyway, despite the heat and humidity and the horrible mosquitos and the constant hum and rumble and dripdripfuckingdrip of my neighbors' various wheezing air conditioners. (I turn mine off, of course, whenever I spend much time outside. It's far too loud, and although the unit may have a big protective grill overlaying the fan, but my imagination always runs to the worst-case-scenario: accidental traumatic finger amputations or some weird reverse current electrocution accident involving the hose, the lawn mower, and my sneakers.)