Remembering Summer in Winter

When I went downstairs for lunch today, I bundled up with a sweater under my heavy jacket. A slick of ice coated the sidewalk where I usually cut across the courtyard to the dining room; I took the longer walk around under the protection of the covered walkways. The weather is dark and dreadful, with sleet and snow coming down and melting into puddles in the grass.

Now I am in my apartment, snug for the rest of the day with my new “Tiffany style” lamp casting a warm glow on the table beside my chair. Charlie didn’t even ask to go out and play. He climbed into my lap and purred as I stroked his ears.

With snow still coming down outside my window it is hard to remember those miserable hot days of summer. People who live in milder climates can not imagine Texas weather. This August we had over 20 days when the thermometer registered over 100 degrees. I avoided heat the same way that today I escape the cold: by staying indoors. Ah! That wonderful invention of a thermostat where a flip of the switch changes the hot air of my furnace into the blessing of air-conditioning. In Texas we sometimes need both in one day.

When I was a child, the only place with air-conditioning was the movie theater. Today mostly young people go to theaters; old folks sit on the couch and watch re-runs on television. But in the depth of the Depression, my Daddy found the cash to take the whole family – wife, grandma, and kids -- to the movies at once a week. It didn’t matter if it was a gangsters or comedians flashing in black and white on the big screen; it was delightful sitting in the cool darkness.

Everything changed when summer brought polio epidemics. Children were not permitted to go anywhere, not to play outside or swim in the park, not go to the movies, not even go to church.

What could a twelve or fourteen-year-old do while confined all the long, hot summer to the house which was like a prison? I read. In my parents’ bedroom was a bookcase with all the National Geographics dating back to 1926, three shelves of the lurid yellow covers with black letters on their tattered spines.

I sat in my great-grandmother’s rocker beside the back window, hoping to catch a cool breeze (which never came) and reading old Geographics. World War II was raging. Europe was blowing up, burning down, cathedrals and cities disappearing under heaps of fallen bricks and twisted steel. I turned the pages of the old magazines and dreamed of Hungarian folk dancers twirling to lift their white skirts like parachutes above knee-high red boots.

Reading to escape reality, with bombs still falling, I planned a trip starting in Paris and circling Spain, Italy, and Greece and up through Germany, ending in Amsterdam. Silly child, what was I thinking?

Forty years later I went to Europe. I saw cities rebuilt as if the war never happened. Not exactly the Europe I imagined looking at pictures in old magazines. But the Europe I found in the ‘80s and ‘90s was endlessly interesting, with new discoveries every place I went.