The other lady and I at the car wash were vacuuming our cars as fast as we could.
She was dressed for work in hospital scrubs, and I was halfway dressed for the office. I was grateful to have had the foresight to change out my nice button-up shirt (which was on a hanger in the car) for a T-shirt for my manual labor, but I hadn’t thought about makeup and hair.
It was only 7:45 a.m., and I could feel the makeup sliding off my face in the humidity. I could tell that my hair, which had looked so great at home at 7:15 a.m., was a limp mess. It was only about 80 degrees, but all 80 of them were magnified over the pavement and thrown back at us with a vengeance.
“This is the only time we could do this,” the other lady said in the quiet moment both of our vacuums had stopped, before we each put in another three quarters.
“You’ve got that right,” I replied.
After the vacuuming was finished, I drove into the MHC Heritage Museum, where I am the executive director, and started up the stairs for the office.
No! I caught myself. I still had to stamp a few envelopes to put in the mail. Even though the work in the office had a stronger actual deadline, walking that one block to the post office before the heat became suffocating seemed like a more important deadline.
I hustled to get out onto the street with my mail by 9:25 a.m., and I made sure to walk on the shaded side of the street, letting the shadows cast by that orange and white building and Ma’s Cakes and the Ground Floor protect me just a little longer from the blazing hot sun. It was already 86 degrees and sticky-humid.
It was 95 when I left work for home. I don’t even bother locking my car on such hot days. There’s nothing inside it anyone could steal that matters more than keeping windows open to prevent the inside of the car feeling like a hot oven when I get into it.
And thus, we planned our days this past week, trying to survive.
When it feels like walking into an oven to go from the office to the car or the car to the house, we think of those who work outdoors or, worse, homeless people who live outdoors, and say a little prayer for them.
Dogs and cats who normally would spend the day outdoors should be inside in these extremes.
In fact, that’s not just common sense: Protecting dogs from weather extremes is the law. Virginia Statute 3.2-6500, which has been in effect since 2020, requires giving dogs adequate shelter during extreme weather – when temperatures are 85 degrees and higher as well as 32 degrees and lower.
This heat changes schedules and alters plans. Everything is planned around trying to avoid it, or to minimize its impact.
In my 100-year-old farmhouse, there’s no relief at night lately, either. Fortunately, my daughter’s room is directly above the HVAC unit, so the cool air doesn’t have to travel far to get to her. Her room is always as cool or as warm as she’d like it to be. The duct to my room, however, travels the longest path in the house, down from the unit, across the house under the floor, and back upstairs.
I stuck it out upstairs Sunday night, when overnight temperatures were in the high 60s. It was OK as long as I didn’t exert myself (like that 45 minutes of ironing and hanging up clothes, which made me break a sweat at 9 p.m. Aren’t there more fun ways of breaking a sweat in the bedroom?). For the rest of the week, I camped out downstairs, which was significantly cooler, on the sofa.
Yet living in an old farmhouse, one thinks about the people before. I was the one who installed central heat and air. I lived through the extremes of heat and cold that first year I was there with no air conditioning and inept baseboard heaters.
Before those baseboard heaters, which were installed in the 1970s, the people living there heated with a wood-burning stove and fireplaces. Cousins Carl Crenshaw and Tommy Wells, who used to visit their grandparents in that house when they were boys, have talked about how cold it would be upstairs there in winter.
People have been talking about growing up without air conditioning in years past. The bodies adjusted because people were used to it, some say. It never used to be this hot, and what we are suffering is from climate change, others say.
Well, we’re past the worse of it – for now.
So let’s take a moment to appreciate what a month before we would have complained about – this week’s refreshingly cool highs in the 80s.
