Endless Summer, or so it feels ! A Ramble

Another hot day in store for us here in North Texas. There is talk of tomorrow being only 98 degrees and that sounds exciting....but its not sweater weather yet. The heat is dangerous, there are now several confirmed heat related deaths to this run of triple digit temperatures.

To be honest I just want some cool weather. I even dreamt of snow last night. In my dream I was outside picking avocados with flip flops on my feet when it started to snow, in a matter of seconds the snow was a foot deep and it felt so good on my nearly bare feet. Some might call that a nightmare, but for me, it seemed very pleasant.

When we first moved here, we lived without air conditioning for a few years and it was difficult. One July when the girls and I were canning peaches, it reached 106 degrees in the kitchen. Having the stove going all day just heated up the house to an almost unbearable state. We had peaches enough to last a year, but each time we ate them, we remembered how hot it was picking them and then how hot it was canning them. Those peaches were worth more than gold to us. I wonder how they ever cooked on wood stoves in the summer in this part of the world, even if the stove was in a separate room, someone had to stand over it while doing the cooking !

Thinking about that sort of life makes me feel a bit of wimp. I would fuss and whine if I had to do such a thing now. Imagine scrubbing the clothes on a washboard when its 100 degrees out ?

Right now, hanging my clothes on the line seems a hot and intolerable job, they dry in under 30 minutes. If I think about it, it seems that this generation has grown soft compared to our great grandparents. We don't deal well with things being difficult. I think that might be why so many people are frightened by the state of the economy right now, it means changing some of our easy ways and not just getting what we want, when we want it. Maybe it means a bit of self denial, self discipline and most of all, it means saying no to the children's wants. Some parents wonder if their children will hate them because they have to say no to the latest want, so they continue to go into debt out of fear that their children might not like them so well if the wallet stays closed.

How did we loose our way ? My grandparents didn't have debt...oh they might have a mortgage on a house, but credit card debt with its "buy it now, no matter if you have the money or not," mentality didn't exist. Even with my parents generation. You saved to buy things, not bought and paid later. My girls take after their dad with money. Neither one is a credit card user. They don't buy before they have the money. They have listened well to a wise teacher, who lives by the "old school".

This heat has me inside the house far more than I like. I would rather talk about the birds I saw singing, or the flowers blooming I saw blooming. I would rather talk about the sounds of nature I heard this morning and of the simple flow of an ordinary day, rather than muse on economics. But at this heat, I stay in more than go out. Maybe now its time to toughen up and go sit with the goats a bit and forget about the price of food and the price of gasoline for a while. We are rather insulated from the full effects of the current state of affairs. We don't drive much, we have a garden, and we live a contented life without all the trappings.

Log cabin Village, Fort Worth, cooking was not a pleasant summer pastime.