The ick of heat & humidity

 

Today was supposed to be pleasanter than the rest of this hot, steamy week.  It's worse.  Maybe not hotter, but much damper.  Heat & humidity is a lousy pairing.

Never realized until this afternoon - feeling lethargic & pucky & wretched - how far back this horrid reaction to the weather goes back.  At least to July 4, 1959.

Mim was out in California, Mike & Peter were somewhere doing summer jobs. At home, it was just Mom & Dad & me - and the first summer after Ian died.

Can still remember the picnic on that steamy Independence Day.  I kept feeling progressively worse, even though our spread-out blanket of Mom's usual picnic delectables was under the huge shade trees bordering
ANC's "old football field" (now the Girls School still unnamed athletic field).  Mom looked at my glassy eyes & said, "Pete, I think we should go home."  So did I.

Which was how Dad had the radio onto the baseball game that evening instead of eating Mom's unforgettable fried chicken & double chocolate cake.  

When the announcer commented on the mighty fire blazing away at a nearby lumber yard, Dad was out of the room.  Coming back in, Mom asked - "Pete, is there another lumber yard, other than Weitzel Lumber (where Dad was a v.p., talented mill man & gifted designer) at such & such corner."  No, just Weitzel's.

Which was how Dad found out it was burning down to the ground.

 

Not exactly good memories connected with heat illness.

Another time was when I was in college.  Dad gassed up the van, handed Mim the keys, and she took Mom & Brooke Pitcairn & yours truly down to see Apollo 15.  Was fine on the trip down, for the launch, but half way up the Carolinas, the blanket of hot July southern heat & humidity dragged me down.  

 

Praise be, I revived slightly enough to enjoy at least part of our big return-home surprise for Mom - an overnight stay at one of the colonial home in Colonial Williamsburg.  Slightly - too laid low the next morning to go with the others to breakfast at the Williamsburg Inn.  If you know me at all, you know I had to be feeling truly miserable to miss that memory.

 

Today, am not feeling quite as wretched as I did on those two occasions.  But getting close.