Steam Bath Nights

Nights like these make me wonder if snow was really all that much of a hardship.

There is no breeze at all off the river and the humidity washes over me like a warm rainstorm. A hundred or so other music lovers are packed into a small outside patio, the smart ones sitting motionless, drinking cold beer and margaritas, melting like ice cream. The musicians, under lights that only add insult to injury, play on and each shake of their heads sends a fine spray of sweat into the air. Trying to take photographs in this unbearable heat, my shirt sticks to my back, my joints ache, my glasses slip. Though still only mid June, it's a steam bath kind of night - mercilessly hot and wilting. After only an hour, I can do more and I trudge to the car, head for a nearby bar and collapse into a table in the back. Drenched, dripping and used up, I cursed hormones, humidity, hot flashes and the entire southeast United States. I would've traded a piece of my soul for a snowbank.

New England seems a lifetime away, another planet perhaps, where I froze for the first two thirds of my life, never being able to get warm enough despite longjohns and as many layers as I could pull on and still be able to walk. I took care with gloves and mittens and scarves and boots and my throat would often burn from the cold while my fingers turned numb and my toes reddened and itched madly with that pre-frost bite sensation. I prayed for an early spring, then for an endless summer and was never satisfied with any season. Moving south seemed like a dream come true, an end to the misery and brutality of winter, the answer to my prayers. Now, as sweat poured into my eyes and every breath was like inhaling a chunk of saturated sponge, as everything radiated astonishing mugginess and the heat was like drowning, I began to have second thoughts.

It was just after one when I left the bar and stepped back into a wave of heat. The time and temperature flashing on one of the buildings told me it was 1:03 and 99 degrees. In New England, I thought, it would be just after midnight and somewhere around 70. In Nova Scotia, it would be just after 11 and with the wind off the ocean no more than 65.

There are days and nights when the places you don't happen to be seem to be perfect.