We’re Having a Heat Wave
There are many things to learn about life in retirement, life in Southern California and life in the mid-stage of the Western COVID resurgence. Let’s start with COVID. Life on the hilltop remains largely unchanged except that I am back to having Handy Brad wear a mask when we interact, less because of the resurgence and more because he flew to the belly of the beast in Dallas last weekend and the combination of sitting three across in economy on American, reading that Dallas is the busiest airport in the U.S. due to its hub activity and the fact that Texas, like all the other “red” states you can think of in the West and South are at the top of the COVID hit parade. Also, Handy Brad and I are very much working together on the landscaping, so we interact more. I had little interest in involving myself with stucco and flashing (something that Brad is quite fond of) but I insist on being involved when rocks are in play and he and I are into stepping stones and rocks right now. Brad is a perfectionist on workmanship issues and I am a “get-it-done” guy, so we help each other out. So far, the new Cecil Memorial Garden on the south side of the house is all mine though Handy Brad is lending me tools and advice on things like how to spread and tamp sand for stepping stone placement. More on that later, when I get to the heat wave, and now back to COVID.
We are OK just seeing a few people for socially distanced dinners. We have no problem with the boredom of stay-at-home life, especially on this hilltop. As we are all realizing, the COVID rubber meets the road when it comes to family. We are fortunate not to have to wave goodbye to family members going into ICU with COVID (that is an unimaginable horror to us). But we are apart from much of our family, and I feel it especially being distant from my kids in NYC. I talk to them at least every other day and try to FaceTime with them once a week for the adults and a few times a week for the grandgerms. Those grandgerms are having the time of their lives at my house in Ithaca, which warms my heart to no end. They are swimming in the pool (both are little fishes), eating Purity ice cream and playing in the yard with their new Gramps toy, a pink PowerWheel Jeep that the two charge up nightly and ride around the back yard daily. It’s hot in Ithaca, but they have good A/C in that house and it is in the lovely Finger Lakes where it rarely stays hot for long.
The COVID talk is about whether to go out for dinner in Ithaca, where even indoor dining has reopened and how that does or doesn’t contradict the fact that the back-to-school topic for the summer is whether two or three days of face-to-face public education is sufficient to educate the girls properly. I am engaged in that dialogue, somewhat because my daughter always chooses to seek my advice on such life issues, but also because I am the Bank of Grandad for the grandgerms’ education, whether primary or supplemental.
My educational story of a few days ago was met with our friend Matthew who is the head of a good private school in Manhattan suggesting that the girls commute there daily. My math says that the Bank of Grandad would be tapped for over $1 million over the next thirteen years. I would sooner put funding into their 529 college funds than take them out of a good public school. Thank you Matthew, but you’ll have to go after active Wall Street mavens for that sort of tuition money. I gave at Little Red for Thomas for fourteen years and at Big Red for Roger, Carolyn and Thomas. I would rather not add it all up as I wonder whether I should splurge on new carpeting for our retirement bungalow. This probably gets me into hot water with Matthew, but he had a month in our Ithaca house to chill about life in the educational world.
So far this year I have learned about how lovely the weather is here in February, March, April and May. I have learned that June Gloom comes at a good time when a break in the sunshine is appreciated and the landscaping benefits from the morning moisture. Those were great days for an afternoon motorcycle ride in the cool. And now we are learning that we love the 70’s days, tolerate the 80’s days and have to be careful with the 90’s days, like today, and predicted for tomorrow. As I have ratcheted up my outdoor yard activities and applied myself to the rocks and trees I love so much, I have come to realize that the combination of heat and sun take a big toll on my generally out-of-shape body. I now spend half of each day sweating outdoors, lifting more than I probably should, digging and planting more than I am used to (at least since my days at the Cornell Plantations forty-six years ago). The sweat feels good when I can soak it away in the hot tub in the newfound shade of my cantilevered umbrella, but that doesn’t work in 94 degree heat when the hot tub registered 104 degrees all on its own. I keep it at 90 degrees for the summer to cool me down, not boil me up. Today, as I weaved my way in from the garden trying not to pass out from heat stroke (yes, I wear a hat, but that ain’t half enough), I sat in the shower and just chilled…literally. I had to take a nap on the bed, something I can’t remember needing for a long time.
I have now read up on heat stroke and I have read the local Heat Advisory on the weather.com app and the message is clear enough. I am to restrict my outdoor activities to the early morning and late afternoon and stay well-hydrated throughout the day. That suits me just fine. I have always been a morning person in whatever I undertake. I prefer to work in the morning and rest in the afternoon, I’m just not used to physical incapacity forcing it upon me. I think in the East, where humidity gets you before heat does, I would choose to stop work before it grabbed me by the throat and sent my head swooning. That is what sun and dry heat apparently does to me. If you asked me if that was the case, I would have said yes, but not until it was over 100 degrees. I guess I will have to attribute the 10 degree difference to age and physical conditioning (or lack thereof). At the Plantations we would spend a day (meaning eight to twelve hours) hauling 75-pound logs from felled trees up the 200 feet of gorge between the paths we were clearing and the truck. 75 pounds must be a magic human capacity number because rocks are packaged in 75-pound plastic bags and I must say they seem much heavier than those logs forty-six years ago. Sand comes in 50-pound bags and that is much closer to my capacity limit these days and luckily, sand is the priority item on the agenda for tomorrow as I lay pavers and stone around the new garden.
My heat wave challenge is to get up and out in the early morning to lay weed barrier (trying to hammer in ground staples as I go). Then there’s the sand as a base for the pavers (6 bags left @ 50 pounds) and the final stone touch of large river rock border stones (4 bags at 75 pounds) and what now amounts to eleven 75-pound bags of pea gravel. If you’re keeping up with the math, that makes hefting and deploying about 3/4 ton of rocks before I collapse from heat exhaustion. I also need to position six bonsai trees in the rock garden and purchase and plant several Bougainvillea on the new bamboo trellises. I do not pretend to be able to finish that by noon, so let’s see what having a heat wave does to my productivity.