I have been to Panama several times and the locals always ask me how I feel about the heat there.  Granted, I have only gone there in the dry season and 85 to 90 degrees doesn’t feel too onerous when compared to 100 degree days in Virginia.  It makes me laugh to imagine that my Panamanian friends think the heat would overwhelm me.  They must think of the north as a place of cold and snow.  Should I invite them to Virginia in August?

While a child growing up in South Carolina in the sixties we didn’t have any air conditioning.  Yet we somehow survived the summer heat.  I remember going to the Charleston area as an eight year old and picking blueberries in a field with the black laborers wondering how they could stand to work in the sun all day.  As a child I spent most of a summer day outdoors chasing black angus cattle and running through corn fields. Some days I would bike three miles to pull an ice cold RC cola out of the drink box at a local service station and gulp the ice cold, sweet carbonated liquid down with the sweaty joy of youth.

Imagine how many lived even a century ago in the US.  No air conditioning.  Cooking over a hot stove in a hot kitchen.  Chopping cotton in the fields all day to go home, eat dinner and sweat all night with no relief, not even a fan. People must have been a lot tougher than I am today with my air conditioning running non-stop.

There has been a wildfire down south from here.  It’s in North Carolina.  The smoke is cloying the 95 degree air with a pungency that is almost overwhelming when combined with the heat.  My neighbors standing around in their front lawns went inside as the air was too thick to breathe.  Hopefully tomorrow will bring relief.  Cooler weather.

Today my gardenia bloomed. God’s yearly gift to me.  The fragrance wafts around in the stickiness, the perfume of early summer.  I pick gardenia blossoms and put them on my car’s dash to become potpourri. While the gardenia blooms I feast upon its scent, greedy and already sad that it won’t last long.