Summer heat

By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor

On sweltering nights when you cannot fall to sleep no sound is larger than the buzz of a mosquito or a trapped moth striking the screen of your bedroom window. In the north woods, in the village of Empire, through open windows you hear the call of a coyote or an owl, an occasional rustle in the leaves and brush as an opossum or porcupine scutters through, the perfect stomping of deer hooves. There is no cooling breeze; the night feels warm and sticky. Well past midnight you rise to look out the window and watch a bat dart back and forth where moths cluster beneath a village street light.

In the afternoon sunlight, July air smells of suntan lotion rising from the beach and drifting on vaporous currents into the village. In the daytime the sounds are mostly of lawn mowers and mopeds, children laughing and the birds — chickadees, grackles and blue jays at the feeder, crows in the distance; and in August, you hear the hottest sound of all, the shrill buzzing of cicadas. There are occasional rumbles of thunder as a storm passes through, cooling the earth for a while, although the rain makes the day more humid later on.

This summer we have been through some extremely high temperatures and humidity. Sagging and droopy feeling, we ate light meals, mostly salads, and drank iced tea. The memory of those days fades when frigid winter weather arrives. Then it’s hard to recall the steamy atmosphere of the past season, and how it felt to drip sweat while your skin stuck to a chair.

Long ago I lived in the city of Detroit where on those sultry summer days before there was air-conditioning, people sighed and wiped their faces on damp and wrinkled handkerchiefs. In the daytime they sought relief in shade under storefront awnings or beneath old trees. Ice cream cones melted too quickly to enjoy and the ice in lemonade quickly melted while the glass sweat droplets and rings onto front porch railings. Dogs and even the old men became snarly. Mothers mopped the brows of their children. Babies cried an inconsolable misery. People placed fans in their windows, facing them into a room to bring in any tinge of cool morning air or outward to draw out the late afternoon heat.

Long ago my mother and I suffered through those murky days and oppressive summer nights in our upstairs flat in Detroit. We placed a sheet on the living room floor and with our heads on our pillows we’d lie there listening, and finally drifting off, to the sounds of the city – streetcars running through the night on their steel rails, buses, taxi cabs, train whistles, sirens on police cars and fire engines, and the horns of the freighters on the Detroit River.

A few years later my mother secured a teaching job in a small rural town. The month was August and on our first night there, again in a rented upper flat, the air was too stifling to lie in our beds, so we placed a sheet on the living room floor. We lay there, wide awake most of that night, and listened to an eerie silence. The night deepened into greater stillness interrupted only by the call of crickets. We couldn’t sleep because of the quiet.

Today I hear that silence as a gift and welcome the sounds of the night — the coyote call, a fox barking, the crickets, an owl. We’ve survived the muggy days and nights. Soon the leaves will fall and the seasons will change rapidly. We’ll close our windows to the biting chill.

When winter winds howl, when ice has formed on the car windshield, when you trudge through knee-deep snow to get the newspaper, try to remember those dog days of summer. Snow shovels and scoops for the driveway, ice scrapers for the car, and crampons on boots for walking to the post office — in a few months these will be part of our world.

The winter night is still and dark, the stars spill across the sky. The moon rises, the coyotes still call, the foxes bark, but the mosquitoes have all gone. Blessed be the changing seasons and the weather of this land in the great north woods.

This GlenArbor.com article was sponsored by Miser’s Hoard in Empire, a beautifully curated collection of new and old, including representation of the work by local artist, Tim Lewis.