My dogs collapsed on the cool plank linoleum floor, fresh from the wet towels on the outside that they had been lining up for. I later flicked the curtain open and offered them a glance out at what they were missing in the daylight. They opened one collective eye and sighed heavily. That was one big “no, thank you” from them. The dog days of summer indeed.
The heat was white in our backyard and even the birds were hiding away from the sizzle in whatever thick bush they could find. At 6:30 p.m. it was still showing over 100 degrees in the shade. Sally, my pig, no longer needed her duvet and begged for some nice cold mud instead. Mary, my horse, who has never seemed remotely affected by any weather before, opted to hide in her stable. She drank copious amounts of water and looked at me with concern in her eyes, as if to say with good reason, “What on earth is going on here?”
I normally take our newscasters’ forecasts with a bit of a pinch of salt… “oh yes the front came in and took this or that away.” There always seems to be an easy out for them on the central coast of California. But this time they nailed it. “This will be an extended period of extremely dangerous heat! Take the highest of precautions with animals, the very young and the very old…” My dogs requested that the animals go first in the sentence, because they could and because they are sorely ill-accustomed to the wielding sword of Mother Nature in March.
About six years ago, we could no longer tolerate the excess heat we were experiencing more than just a handful of times a year and broke down and “invested” in air conditioning. Now I would say it’s a necessity in these parts. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me for the number of my A/C guy these past few days and I imagine he’s doing pretty well for himself right about now. For years we lived with just the breeze from the ocean beyond the Santa Lucia Mountains gifting us with her charming presence. We never closed up the house during the daytime or talked about trying to cool it down. Times have changed in recent years; I can tell you that!
This heatwave had a different flavor to it. It was brutal in a way that a normal spell of super warm weather is not. The rhythms of our fruit trees and flowers got slapped upside the buds and the bloom and who knows what kind of a fruit harvest we will have this year. The apple green hills turned quickly French fry yellow, and, already, the old man is talking about watering the lawn again. In March. Are we in August already? No, we are in March. The Sierra was forced to hasten the closure of their ski season — not because they didn’t get enough snow over the wintertime, but because all the snow was already melting. In March.
And then they say that this week we will experience a “major cooling.” (What does that mean? Pull out the sweaters again?) I can only imagine what that will do to our blossom. Wait, the apricot tree has already gone to fruit. In March.
Not a darn thing to be done about it, as Granny would say, but it is an interesting world we live in. We hope for the generations to come that the climate won’t continue to get hotter and hotter, until mostly folk have to live inside and venture out only in the dark time. What a horror movie that would be.
In the meantime, I look back on my February trip to the Isle of Man (an island between England and Ireland) and how I thought I had never been that cold in my life. (Except for maybe on the Great Wall of China. In March.) Perhaps, as my father notes, these things are cyclical and will change like the wind at will. Like the world. Like us.
For my selfish part, I am so glad we invested in air conditioning when we did. It’s a bit of a luxury (the solar panels do make me feel a lot better about my ecological footprint), but my argument is that life is short and we need to feel comfortable in our latter years! Anyone who wants to use our house as a “cooling station” is more than welcome to come by when the next heatwave is in town. You may be competing for floor space with six panting dogs surrounded by a bunch of damp towels, but I imagine you’ll trade that for the blistering heat.
Now the big heats have finally gone to the desert where they belong, we sigh huge gusts of relief, as we, once again, leave our screens open to the breezes, and enjoy the chirping of happy birds resting on the tree branches. I cannot worry about my apricot harvest, because that is up to the wiles of nature and some years, in the prairie land we live on, give us good harvests and some not so good; and that has absolutely nothing to do with the weather it seems. What do I know?
I do know this. A temperature reading of over 100 degrees in the shade for several days in a row is very excessive in March. People are talking about this being a record smashing summer — we already broke several last week — and how are we all going to manage? For my part, I shall be investing in more doggie towels, so my pups can remain cool and hydrated. Yes, take care of your pups and your peeps, in that order.
