I Can Take This Heat

This post is dated wrong. It was written sometime during the summer of 2013. and just found it while seeking a poem called"the plum-shaped woman"  - if you find the poem somewhere, let me know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~summer 2013~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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I can take this heat. It’s not in my genes – my grandparents routinely abandoned the living quarters of their seaside home and headed down to the dark cellar with its floor of sloping bedrock, low floor-joists and plumbing runs overhead. A pair of small ground-level windows faced the harbor, partly obscured by the flowerbed growing along the foundation. Down there, in a mid-day dusk, Papa and Meme sat at a small wooden table painted light blue on small wooden chairs painted to match. Cloth napkins, picnic stainless tableware, melamine dishes and a colorful tablecloth helped create a festive atmosphere while two folding camp cots, neatly folded and stacked against the concrete, were available if the heat did not relent at night.

It’s rarely really hot at the edge of the Atlantic in Maine, but my ancestors came from offshore islands and even the relative cool of the shore was hotter than island air. 75° would find them scurrying for the comfort of a shallow Maine cellar surrounded by tiers of next winter’s firewood, empty bushel baskets ready to store fall-dug Dahlia bulbs, a great wall of shelves filled with every kind of sweet pickle, and a few laundry items hung inside to prevent fading.

The cellar felt close and dark to me, used to spending my days outdoors on a boat or in a sunny garden. What could they find to do in this small dark space? On the table, a couple of books to read, a watch to repair or a tool to fix, the National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and Audubon magazines beside the seed catalog, and some mending and a basket of yarn being turned into mittens or an afghan. The small radio picked up the weather station and a CB listened in on conversations between boaters and lobstermen. Often, though, I would arrive to see Papa just sitting, his eyes turned toward the small high window facing the harbor beyond the tangle of pansies and nasturtiums, but he was looking further than I could see – he was watched for more than eighty years and did not need to watch anymore.  

When I was pregnant, 6 years after my grandfather died and four years after I married and moved out of my grandmother’s house, there came a night so hot that my little house in town become unbearable: no cellar, no breeze, and close to a noisy, smelly road. By midnight the heat of the day still clung to my bloated body: an overheated pregnant incubator, I smothered under the heavy motionless air in our tiny airless bedroom room in our tiny house. The old bed sagged, bodies settling deeper into the sweat-damp bedding. 

We had been camping that week, and in our camping gear was a full-size inflatable mattress. If I could not sleep, at least I could get out of this bedroom sauna. Against my husband’s sleepy protestations, I got out the foot pump and the air mattress and grabbed the car keys.

The next morning, my grandmother was alarmed to see people sleeping out on the end of her dock. I’m not sure she ever fully forgave me for the shock - though she fully understood and forgave the trespass itself.

I can take this heat. Here in the attic on a day that passed 90° with no breeze and the un-tempered sun thick and heavy on this roof designed for solar gain, the room is hot enough that my body feels cool to the touch compared to the air and the furniture in the room. Instead of noticing the heat - the heavy blanket of warm air covering my bare skin – I pay attention to the smell of heat, of attic blankets and rolled-up rugs, old papers and boxes of books, of antique baskets made by Passamaquoddy Indians and the faint electromagnetic smell of this computer. As a sailor blinded in fog listens for a change in the sound of waves signaling shore, the hairs on my damp arms are alert for the slightest breeze, the first indication that the peak of heat has passed and we can open windows and doors, pull back curtains, roll up blinds and let the last of the day join us inside.  

I can take this heat because this room is my room. The scattered papers and disorganized CDs are my scattered papers and CDs. The window-screen held in place with a ribbon and two clothespins is my screen, my ribbon, my clothespins. Out the window I can see my garden, poppies blooming, tomatoes prostrate without strings to fasten them to stakes, grass already getting thick again. Outside there are weeds to be pulled and an evening breeze starting to drift through the tallest trees: the day out there is becoming pleasant. But here in this room, soaked with sweat, sitting on a hard wood chair, surrounded by the disorder of recent reorganization, here I can sometimes hear my own thoughts – if I stay long enough and listen hard enough.

In my attic room the ceiling is low and the walls are close. A clutter of memorabilia fills boxes in the eaves: my daughter’s high-school awards, wedding photo albums from expired marriages, boxes of yarn, winter clothes, storm doors and toys for toddlers in case grandchildren or other such incidents might happen someday. Through the bi-fold doors, my room holds books I mean to read someday and books I mean to write; paintings waiting to be finished or framed and hung, enough music to last for years and years of daily hearing something new, and if that gets dull, a radio that receives public radio and, with some tweaking, the non-public non-profit stations.

My iMac breathes quietly, whirring air through its gills. But here I sit, turned toward the purple-star-studded batik curtains in the window, facing the freshly burst African lilies, thickly clustered pink poppies, hostas dripping lavender bells ringing the hydrangea massed with snow-white puffs and daylilies tangled with astilbe frothy in the border.

But I am not looking. I am not doing. I am not thinking. I am just here, sitting.