Evening: baked earth giving heat back to the sky....
I keep thinking of my relationship to heat, to summer and sun; linked of course with my usual wondering about my relationship with productivity, with writing, with aging, with feeling well, with being happy, with the many other versions of my life I can imagine, and the other places I can imagine experiencing them. And even linked with my skin and hair, which are better because of the heat, or perhaps are not.
Somewhere between relaxation and exhaustion, between well-being and debility...
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later at night: when really cool breezes start floating in the windows. I'd love to get acclimatized to the hotter life, and figure out how to live in it....
Think about other, remembered, heats: since I don't have a particularly good memory, this won't be every one of forty-nine summers. (Hmm, After Forty-Nine Summers Dies the Swan – no, not a very good title, except perhaps for a rather unsuccessful crime novel.) One: Los Angeles, early 1990s; when I wrote several sad, rather aimless pieces; the scratchy tweed couch in the summer sunshine, all suffused with too much lying around in my bathrobe, having finally finished my master's thesis, wondering whether I was going to die soon or should start on my PhD dissertation, wondering if I should move back to San Francisco, wondering if I should.
Another: the August week in Crete, I was really and truly not well: I went virtually for a respite, and Kunsu and Gerhard took such great care of me. Was that really just last summer?
Barcelona, a dazzling sense of endless folding shuttered doors designed for the heat. Gran Canaria, a week baking in the sun.
As for here in northern England, although I've lived here nearly four years now, I don't have strongly charged memories of what summer feels like. Much of that is probably because we rarely have such powerful heat – but there is also the strangeness of the past two (was it two? again, memory blurs) summers, where, because I was ill for different reasons (thyroid leading to endless sleep, that was the most recent), I didn't really experience the summer except as a time when nobody bothered me....
Can the cheap thermometer in my alarm clock really be right? Is it really almost 80° in my bedroom? That is either wonderful or annoying... and it's too hot to really care which it is....
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