Pop Corn at 106

This morning the sky was a peacock blue with only a few tufts of cottony white clouds in places. It was beautiful, but the rich icy blue was also a strange harbinger of heat coming. By 9:00 the air draped over our shoulders like a wool shawl…just as it has done for days, will do the rest of this week.

Yesterday we went by DH’s family farm in Kansas. The corn was so burned and dry. Some fields had a tinge of green left, but not this one. It was blistered to withered stubble. Had there been any breeze at all, I am sure the stalks would have rustled like a crinoline petticoat!


We were in Kansas because my mom had a sudden surgery. They found her gall bladder rotting inside and gangrenous fluid around it. An hour surgery took closer to three, and she was put in ICU for a while afterwards. She will have a longer recovery but things look better today.


I ordered my mom some flowers this morning, wondering what they might have in this hot season. They had only a pink but the delivery truck was coming. I urged them to find something red if possible. My mom and I had a color war when I was about five years old. Red is my mom’s favorite color, and this was the years when she wore Rita Hayward nail polish and lipstick to match her red clothes. All I wanted was pink everything, a color she detested. She was determined I would like red when her mother finally convinced her to let the five year old have her “pink spell”. I had pink Easter dress and coat, pink shirts, pink jeans, and I would have had pink shoes if I could have found them in the market that only did white and black patent Mary Janes.


I recall a lot of childhood things these days; how far away my memories seem from today’s world. I remember staying with my cowgirl Gran a week each summer. One of my favorite things to do was go with her to her Tripoli club, an excuse for about eight women to eat, play, laugh and gossip. I remember one really hot summer that we visited a house cooled by a water cooler, no central air then. I stretched out on the itchy carpet and played with my Annette Funicello paper dolls and eavesdropped on the ladies game and chatter. When one lady said she kept her underwear in the Frigidaire freezer, I gulped. My mind struggled with that one, trying to picture what frozen panties felt like!


The late afternoon is now 106 here. The thermometer on my desk is registering 82 and that is with the air conditioner pumping away. The electric bill came in at $300 last week, and as I listen to the ac work, I know the meter is clicking up a nice big bill for next month too!