These are cotton candy days...
...dry hot and insubstantial. Rapidly melting away into nothingness. The skies are empty but for a few wisps of gauzy clouds. When you walk outside the air settles on you like a weightless cloak, hot air running over your eyelashes, hot air rushing into your lungs, hot air pressing against your ears.
I have a strange relationship with this weather. The Santa Anas strip the moisture from my lips and eyeballs. They make the air electric. They make the world seem dangerous and unbearable. I feel vulnerable and raw and suddenly very able to snap into insanity.
But in the mornings, when the air is warm and soft and caresses you like the gentle hand of a mother stroking her child's head, when the birds start to sing and the nights are warm and clear, when you can drive with all the windows open, blast your summer-music and hold your left arm out the window pretending to fly....THAT is when i love the heat.
It fills you with this excitement and expectation. It makes it impossible to concentrate.
It's like God forgot that summer was supposed to start in June, not in March. It should be raining right now, but instead the air is alive with a lazy carefree heat. Thin clothing. Fresh cut grass. The stickiness of plum juice on your fingers. Iced tea. Hot metal railings on cool air-conditioned skin. Bare feet. The smell of sweat and sunscreen. The bliss of having nothing to do.
That's not the case of course. I have so much to do. And plums aren't in season so I can't pull them off of the trees at the Theatricum. But it feels like I could.
It's taken me a few days to adjust to the heat. On sunday I worked Purim carnival and MELTED. I wasn't expecting it to be so hot and I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt. And the winds were blowing so hard that the cotton candy we were making flew in sticky wisps all over the carnival...and all over me. I was covered from head to toe in it. I took a nap in my car before school on Monday and when I woke up I couldn't breathe from the heat.
But then last night I was driving home and the air was so wonderful that I opened my windows, put on Guster at full volume, sang at the top of my lungs and held my arm out the window at seventy miles an hour the whole way home.
It was a spiritual experience.
I have a strange relationship with this weather. The Santa Anas strip the moisture from my lips and eyeballs. They make the air electric. They make the world seem dangerous and unbearable. I feel vulnerable and raw and suddenly very able to snap into insanity.
But in the mornings, when the air is warm and soft and caresses you like the gentle hand of a mother stroking her child's head, when the birds start to sing and the nights are warm and clear, when you can drive with all the windows open, blast your summer-music and hold your left arm out the window pretending to fly....THAT is when i love the heat.
It fills you with this excitement and expectation. It makes it impossible to concentrate.
It's like God forgot that summer was supposed to start in June, not in March. It should be raining right now, but instead the air is alive with a lazy carefree heat. Thin clothing. Fresh cut grass. The stickiness of plum juice on your fingers. Iced tea. Hot metal railings on cool air-conditioned skin. Bare feet. The smell of sweat and sunscreen. The bliss of having nothing to do.
That's not the case of course. I have so much to do. And plums aren't in season so I can't pull them off of the trees at the Theatricum. But it feels like I could.
It's taken me a few days to adjust to the heat. On sunday I worked Purim carnival and MELTED. I wasn't expecting it to be so hot and I was wearing a black long-sleeved shirt. And the winds were blowing so hard that the cotton candy we were making flew in sticky wisps all over the carnival...and all over me. I was covered from head to toe in it. I took a nap in my car before school on Monday and when I woke up I couldn't breathe from the heat.
But then last night I was driving home and the air was so wonderful that I opened my windows, put on Guster at full volume, sang at the top of my lungs and held my arm out the window at seventy miles an hour the whole way home.
It was a spiritual experience.