Today I went to pick up my two bags of corn that I get every year to put up in the freezer. On the way home the air conditioning in the van, which has been on its last leg for a few weeks now, seemed to barely be working at all. We were soooo hot.
Boomama, who talked about the heat in the South yesterday, told someone in St. Louis a few of her “Southern Heat Horror Stories,” and it made me think about how every good “Southern Heat Horror Story” should involve at least one air conditioning catastrophe at 100 degrees with a heat index of 105.
As we were speeding down the road (because, and I’m not making this up, the faster I went the cooler it seemed), Clementine said, “I think we are just spoiled. In Little House on the Prairie days they didn’t even have any air conditioning!” And I laughed, because even though she has never known what it is like to live without air conditioning and I have never known what it is like to live without air conditioning, we do realize that it has been done in the past without complaint.
(But, you could argue, they didn’t know what they were missing.)
We, however, are a bunch of heat wimps, in spite of the belief that we have all kinds of Southern Heat Endurance.
When we got home and recovered from our hot drive, a storm blew in and cooled things down nicely, which worked out well for my little corn shuckers. Kids come in so handy sometimes.
Once the shucking was done, I began the blanching and cutting off process. I was working along well with Tess in her high chair (looking admittedly a little out of sorts- this would be foreshadowing, a term we recently discussed in our study of Little House on the Prairie) and the rest of my dear family gathered around the table playing a particularly loud and competitive game of Ker-plunk.
The game ended. Tess was released from her high chair and promptly began vomiting on the kitchen floor.
Times like this, when chaos surrounds me and yet the normal, routine things continue to demand my attention, I always think about that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer finds his girlfriend’s pinkie toe, puts it in a Cracker Jack box, steals a bus to take it to the hospital, fights off a mugger and yet continues to make the bus stops.
“You kept making all the stops?”
Ah, Seinfeld was a great show.
No matter what is going on: a kid vomiting, corn exploding all over the kitchen, someone having a tantrum, I still have to make all the bus stops. Diapers still have to be changed, phones answered, bathtub water turned off, questions answered, drinks fixed, instructions given and the catastrophe dealt with all at the same time.
