105 degrees

Isn't it strange how much more socially acceptable it is to be disgrunted? Because then people feel like you have something to share, to give them, and that whole feeling of coercion you get when you duck under an umbrella with someone to get out of the rain.

There’s so much electricity in being anxious, people can’t help themselves but surround their anxieties around yours. Communities are born from a mutual dissatisfaction.

The grocery store yesterday, and the group murmur when someone in line groaned “Can you believe it’s 105 degrees outside?” and the next group murmur that followed when the amateur meteorologist buying heirloom tomatoes reported that the next day would be even hotter.

Yes, I admit I was hot, too. Who wouldn’t at 105 degrees?

But I couldn’t imagine turning to the woman behind me fanning herself with an US Weekly magazine and tell her breathlessly, how delighted I was my sister was coming over for dinner, and that despite this great happiness, I was looking even more forward to going to bed with E after everyone left, lying there on top of the blankets with E with the lights off and listening to the swamp birds.

Of course I couldn’t have done that – you don’t tell that kind of thing to strangers. You don’t talk about love. You talk about Angelina Jolie’s woes with adoption and you talk about the fact that there is no breeze and George Bush and the possible drought and the tragedy of this or that and you never talk about the reprieve of nightfall, once the heat has settled and then retreated, and how the moon rises, again and again, ever vigilant and hopeful, over a sleeping town.