Pittsburgh is in the midst of a sweltering heatwave. I joke with everyone that it must be 200% humidity in the city, and with every time I repeat it, it becomes less and less of a joke. Mishka is bored out of his skull, because it’s too hot to reasonably spend a large portion of time outside, and I can’t take him on errands with me because even with all the windows down in the car, I am afraid of him getting overheated during the shortest excursion into the bank or a store. That being said, I do take him out once a day at most, testing the sidewalk with the back of my hand so his paw pads don’t burn. We’ve been making excursions into “town;” West End Village roughly a mile down the hill from the house.
There’s a little hardware store on Wabash that I take Mishka into when I need odds and ends for the house. There’s no air conditioning, but the ceilings are high (probably 15-20 feet) and a breeze that blows through the back door and spills out to the sidewalk. I needed two-inch-long screws and the owner, an older white man, went through a shelf of boxes tracking down the right gauge, length, and head for me. As he rang me up I could feel beads of sweat run from the back of my scalp, over my shoulder, and down into the front of my shirt. A few doors down is a little bodega that sells lottery tickets and percolator coffee. I took Mishka into there for an instant cappuccino and ended up buying a $1 lottery ticket, and Mishka got a peanut butter dog bone on the house. That’s the nice thing about living in this neighbourhood — every place I go seems to be fairly dog-friendly. Everyone wants to say hello to Mishka, and with the heat being as oppressive as it is, he’s even more mellow than usual.
One walk like that (45 minutes tops) and the dog is out for the day. I’d like to say I do it to free myself up to get things done, but with no central air in the house and the humidity being what it is, I spend my afternoon lying around on the couch and watching shows I’m only half-committed to on Netflix. I sat with a giant pitcher of lemon water and a big bowl of popcorn yesterday afternoon, when the beau texted me to let me know he was coming over. He found me melted to the couch with popcorn all over my face and lap. “Aren’t you sexy right now,” he said with a grin, plucking popcorn off of my cheek. Maybe if it had been ten degrees cooler I’d care enough to have cleaned up.
The garden is doing well, though. The last few days have brought thunderstorms, and my cucumbers are swelling to gargantuan proportions. I found two hidden away under dinner-plated-sized leaves that were each the size of my face. (I brought them on my lunch date earlier this week with my best friend Alex, and upon his arrival, wordlessly handed him the plastic bag with two giant cukes. He stared at me, his face contorting into a confused and amused expression, and then laughed.) Everything is growing like mad, and the rains do nothing to abate the heat. My back door is made of old wood, and it has swollen in the door frame over the last week to the point where I have to kick it and throw all of my weight into it just to get it to open. I’ve resigned myself to walking round to the front door to let myself in. Just one more thing to add to the list of home improvements: buy a new kitchen door.
Last night when my dear friend and former professor Roger came for dinner, we ate steaks and drank red wine and I achieved an almost-instantaneous headache. It was my first day of alcohol after a week of teetotalling, and the impending storm coupled with dehydration and wine created the perfect recipe for pain. We sat in my living room only half-watching an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I remembered a brilliant essay by Joan Didion called Los Angeles Notebook. It seemed the perfect thing to read aloud, given the atmosphere of mishaps and strained communication I’ve been experiencing all week amid the heat.
As I type this, I’m sitting on my back porch and the thunder is rolling in the distance. A very light sprinkling of rain is passing through, and I’ve just hung the whites up on the line to dry. A part of me wants to take them down and throw them in the dryer, but another says, Let them soak in the rain. They’ll dry tomorrow either way. The forecast promises 90 degree weather.