The mercury hit 110 degrees today. We went to the public pool in Denton — a nice place with slides and floating islands — but it was hot even there, beside the water under the trees. I sat in the shade and even then, I felt hot. I read the first few chapters of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and thought about how nice it would be if, like Lucy in the story, I could take a quick trip from summer back to a snowy land of winter to cool off, and then come back to the summer afternoon a few hours later after the sun went down. The kids stayed in the water for hours until we had to go, then ate lunch ravenously and fell asleep. 

Summer gets this sweltering and  you wish fall would come and cool it off,  even though fall means going back to work for everyone and it’s hard to wish for that.  But you know you can’t bear much more of this either. It’s too hot for tomatoes to set fruit, too hot to heat up the kitchen cooking normal foods, if you want to walk outside you’ve got to do it before 8 a.m., and you get tired of sandwiches and barbecued food. People honk at you for no apparent reason when you’re driving, and you don’t know if they’re short tempered or if the heat is making you so languid you’re forgetting how to drive properly.

I think of summer as my favorite time of year, really I do! But the fact is that it always seems to be summer when nagging fears, obsessions and various paranoias seem to come into the fore, perhaps because there’s so few regularly scheduled activities to distract me from them. If you don’t use your free time for something productive, your head may use the extra energy to begin thinking up stuff that’s downright destructive to your peace of mind.

So, yes, summertime and the living is easy, spending time sitting down by the pool, relaxing and cooling off, Yes. And yet. And yet. I read on Wikipedia that the name “dog days” comes from the Latin,  diēs caniculārēs, and refers to summer days from early July to mid August during which the Romans believed that the Dog Star, Sirius, somehow impeded things from getting done. I suppose it’s easy to claim this a ridiculous superstition, and yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to get things done during early August. A lof of the time, you just stay inside, crank up the air conditioner, and try not to think about the blistering rays of sun outside and that if the modern conveniences like AC were to fail we’d get fried like eggs before we knew it. I’m sure we’ll be fine. But it does make me a little nervous, thinking about it.