Monthly Archives: August 2011

Heat of the Moment

It is mid-August and I am wearing a heavy fleece and wool socks, the fuzzy kind you keep in the drawer for the ski lodge. Wrapped around me is a blanket that trails behind like a cape as I scamper from room to room in our Victorian row house, searching for open windows. I haven’t yet tackled the hot-water heaters, and I struggle to turn them on with the onset of dark. Rain pelts the windows and I sit deep in the sofa cushions, my children on my lap. I am not trying to soothe them. This is an act of self-preservation – their bottoms are warm.

Yesterday it was a sunny delight. No more.

Even rain can't stop punting on the River Cam.

My mobile voice mail is bleating. I listen to a message from my friend Kristine who’s in London. “I’m calling to ask if it’s f–king freezing in Cambridge because it’s absolutely freezing down here. I don’t know why I’m surprised by this.”

No, but I am surprised. The fates torture me as I flip open my laptop and read an email from my friend Julie. “It’s gruesomely hot,” she laments  “both in DC and Dallas (where they’re into their 47th consecutive day of triple digit temps) and I’m just totally over summer. Never thought it would happen but it’s true.”

I consider putting my jeans in the drier for a tumble as I  shuffling to the kettle. This is it, my first genuine discovery: tea, the national salve, is also….hot.

I wonder, with a wince, what the weather will be like when winter approaches. Because last I checked, we’re in prime shorts-wearing season here.

Shorts, accessorized with a Snuggie.

3 Comments

Bee Nice

Before we left Washington, DC, my young son had one reaction when encountering a bee – an ear-splitting scream, very Fay Wray in delivery and decibel. But that was before, before, before we left the land of the disease-riddled Tiger mosquito and entered the virtual beehive known as England, where strawberries are succulent, flowers blossom in every raggedy garden and bees rule.

Doing what bees do best, at the Cambridge Botanical Garden

There was a time, just months ago,  when I’d consider the current visitation a “swarm.”  But in fact, these insects (bees, wasps and hoverflies, which masquerade as stinging pests), are so plentiful (in yards, parks, restaurants, even, dare I say it, buzzing in and out of my bedroom windows), that I’ve become desensitized. Cocktails in the garden with bees using my thighs as a landing strip? Sure! Bees in the loo? Come on in.

Some say this year’s crop is particularly intense (I recently saw some stoic Brits evacuate a charming outdoor tea garden as bees bombed their quaking trays of fresh scones.) There is a limit, I’m told.

But even my son now accepts the bugs as part of the landscape, warning “move on bee,” with a flick of his hand. My daughter gleefully squashes them with her tiny shoes. I expect less ennui after their first stings. But in truth, I’ll take the risk over a summer of perpetually itchy limbs and the toxic odor of Deet.

Or maybe it’s the crumpets smeared with English set honey that has me numbed into submission. Ask me after I get stung.

Leave a comment