Meltdown

It’s only July and I’m already asking myself how in the world I ended up here. How could I not have known how intolerant I would become in my older years? And how is that I didn’t even realize it all those years ago?

Who was that person who years ago would intentionally lie out in it for hours, baking her skin to a brown crisp? Who would walk a mile, there and back, to the curb store down the road, just to get an ICEE that would be melted before we got halfway back home?

Now she’s the person that gets irritable and mad, thirty minutes before it’s time to get off work, because she’s going to have walk from the front door to her car, which is all of ten steps. Because she knows the second she opens the truck door, the heat that will come rolling out in waves of steam will almost knock her to the ground, and most certainly take her breath away.

She won’t even be able to touch the steering wheel initially, she’ll have to turn the air on high, roll all the windows down, and let the heat of the last eight hours, find its way out of the truck. She’s almost tempted to drive 80 MPH down Hwy 90 just so the circulation of air conditioner and the rush of the hot air coming in will at least move it out a little bit faster; even if it means sacrificing some of her cooler air to push it out.

As she drives down the road, she questions her entire intelligence on ever buying a black vehicle with black interior – as it seems to just soak up that heat and set it on fire, while it waits for her to come back to it every afternoon.

She told her mother the other day, she wonders how in the world she ever thought she could stand living here? And her mother said, but where would you live? Where it snows? And she was right, because gracious knows I’m not made for shoveling snow these days.

There has to be somewhere in between the fire breathing dragon of the south that we call Florida, and the snowbound north that could be most anywhere else but here.

And to top all of that off, we’ve been in a drought here for the last few weeks; but we finally got some much needed rain tonight. At least when it rains, it cools off the atmosphere for a bit.

But tomorrow will bring another day of waking up with the sidewalks steaming and the temperatures with highs of what I’d like to weigh again, instead of how hot it is.

I want to be able to strap a portable a/c unit to my back and just carry it everywhere I go. Can’t someone invent something like that? Isn’t there anyone who hates the heat as much as I do? Isn’t anyone else literally crying because we still have the whole months of July and August to get through before we see any relief? I don’t think I’m going to make it folks, I really just don’t.