Hot Days

The hydrangea wilts, the hammock waits, the cicadas hum. It is midsummer in Virginia, a sizzling hot day on tap, 101 before it's all over, they say.

I remember other scalding summers, cooling off on the Staten Island ferry in Manhattan, the feeble breeze of a single fan in a shotgun apartment in Lexington, the blistering pavement of Chicago in July (which seemed unfair given how frigid it had been the previous winter), our long honeymoon summer on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. It was so humid all the envelopes sealed themselves.

When I think back on the hot days, the misery does not translate. What remains is a sense of life fully lived.