Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Suddenly Last Summer

I am reminded of Tennessee Williams on a day such as this. Blazing hot, sweltering in the shade, everything slowed down to the rhythm of the fan, still and calm. What else was central to Williams' plays was how the heat altered the people. Like alcohol, the intensity of the warmth has a profound effect on everyone. Especially because this kind of sultriness is quite alien to the west coast of Canada.

Bearing this aberration in mind, I will consciously make room for the somewhat cranky, out-of-sorts behaviour around me, including my own. This is not a time to be making life altering choices.

In this white hot heat and the aforementioned seismic activity from the birth of Kai, I am reminded to "let go and breathe". We don't have the generations of cultural adaptation to such warmth and have no traditions to respect it. This is the time of siesta and dining late in the evening. This is the perfect time to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara (can you tell that Gone With the Wind also had a radical influence on me?) "It's too hot to think about that now, let's talk about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day." (okay, you have to have the visual too, right? The southern belle, sighing with hand to brow??)

Being light in the heaviness of an unexpectedly tropical high pressure ridge - that is my challenge today.

2 comments:

Extranjera said...

As a Finn, when I read Williams and Mitchell as a teenager (I know, am dorky), I could never understand the talk about the heat. I just couldn't. And then we moved to Savannah, Georgia.

Thank you so much for the memory of that epiphany. You rock Grandma. ;o)

Extranjera said...

Also, tagging you for a meme. Check my blog tomorrow.