As a transplanted "Southerner" I have learned to expect intensely hot and humid summers. This summer has been exceptionally warm, and the heat has extended far beyond our southern borders. I spend more time indoors than out during these blistering heat spells, but as a child growing up in Ohio near the Lake Erie shores, my siblings and I reveled in the heat of summer.
Since we were a family of seven, my parents couldn't afford luxurious vacations or a built-in swimming pool with five mouths to feed. When we were younger we cooled off by running through the sprinkler or simply letting mom spray us with the garden hose.
When I was eleven we got our very first swimming pool. It was only about 24 inches deep and about a dozen feet wide, but it seemed like heaven. It sat on the cement foundation where our barn had been. My sisters and I would wake early and beg to go swimming by eight in the morning. Mom would tell us we couldn't go in the water until the water temperature in the pool reached 70 degrees, thus beginning the agonizingly slow process of watching the mercury rise on the pool thermometer. Like sentries on guard duty, my sisters and I would take turns monitoring until the summer sun would warm the water from the overnight 60s to the magic 70 degrees. We would stay in the water until we were wrinkled, and our lips blue from the cold.
As an adult I prefer my pool water more on the tepid side (85 degrees) and there is no way I would put my big toe in 70 degree water! On a day like today in the south when the temperature is pushing past 95 degrees and the humidity is equally high, I will close my eyes and remember how we begged for the heat of summer to warm our little pool. Ah, let's just keep loving the heat of summer.
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