Dog Days

Our month of rain - 18 consecutive days of downpours - finally ended, and the weather lept right past spring and into summer. It's been hot for half a dozen days straight. Not "warm, with a cool breeze come nightfall," not "time to get the patio chairs out," but "oh, I forgot Boston gets so HOT," hot. Can't sleep hot. Don't bother walking the dogs hot.

I came late to air conditioning. As a midwestern kid, we didn't have it. Too expensive, too newfangled, and there was a bit of "Grandpa didn't have AC, and he did OK" righteousness hidden in there somewhere too. Instead, people had basements. Not the dirt-floor bare-stone cellars of New England, but a proper Midwest basement, painted cinderblock walls and sound absorbing ceiling tiles and linoleum on the floor. Folks differed on the furnishings, however. The old timers virtually had a second house downstairs, with upholstered living room furniture, a big kitchen table to eat supper around, a second refrigerator. My Grandmother was the envy of her set, as she had a second kitchen stove tucked away next to the laundry tubs and washing machine. No summertime halt in the daily baking routine for her, just because it hit 98 degrees outside.

The younger folks of my parent's generation, went more for something like the "rec rooms" they saw on TV. Ping-pong tables, strange orange Eames ripoff sling chairs from Sears, the old TV set that was deemed too good to throw out, even though Cousin Billy had to fuss with it for a while to pry a dim perlescent image out of it. A proper bar, with bar stools for the men to sit on while drinking their beer-and-a-bump or highball and listening to the baseball game.

So, while the great midwest burrowed underground to survive, what did Bostonians do? For the cooks, cleaners, and chauffeurs who were the "downstairs" staff in the big houses, the answer was to crawl up to their beds in the attic, tucked under the slate roof with perhaps one eighteen inch double-hung window for ventilation. I suspect the only thing that prevented the mass slaughter of homeowners in their beds was the near heat prostration of their downtrodden servants. That, and the fact that the homeowners weren't actually in their beds. They were at the summer house in Hull, or out on the sleeping porch.

What's that, you say? Imagine a typical posh brick Colonial style house. First floor - center entrance hall, dining room, pantry, kitchen on one side, living room on the other. Off the living room, a solarium; basically a brick addition glued on the side, with floor to ceiling windows all around and a flat copper roof rather than a proper slate one. Just the thing to show off the family collection of Jade plants and Diffenbachia that were Grandmama's pride and joy.

Upstairs - bedroom, bathroom, bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, nursery. Funny....what's that porch door doing off the master bedroom? Well, sometime in the 1880's some builder probably got tired of hearing complaints about the view out the bedroom window being obscured by the solarium roof, and they basically covered it up with another porch. They started out mimicking the Widow's Walks of Nantucket with a flat floor surrounded by railing, but eventually these second-story porches turned into proper rooms, with screened openings on three sides. And, in the summer the gentleman and lady of the house, perhaps with a couple of kids, camped out in the luxury of whatever breeze there might be.

Today, there's an armed battle between the preservationists, who see sleeping porches as symbolic of a unique niche in architectural history, and the homeowners trying to keep them from crumbling into rubble. Nothing says "maintenance nightmare" like a room with eight leaky windows, a flat roof under a New England snow load, and neither insulation, heat, nor proper foundation.

It's easy being Green

Around here, at least, Kermit's old maxim is being turned on its head. You see, the trees are in bloom, which means not just flowers, but pollen. Yellow-green pollen.

Imagine a lowly ragweed, standing perhaps two feet tall, with a handful of tiny flowers. Imagine yourself as a hay fever sufferer, sneezing away a hundred yards downwind. Now, scale that plant to the size of a Sycamore Maple, with a crown covered in dense handfuls of bunched blooms, and put yourself anywhere within a few miles. We're talking pollen in Kilogram quantities, pollen that blows like powder snow across the streets, covers the puddles with an oily film, and turns every car into hip-color-of-the-month from the VW dealer. It's a bit warm so all the house windows are open, and each window is shadowed by a diffuse semicircle of green dust on the floor below.

In our back yard we have an English Elm, more than three feet in diameter and well over a hundred years old. I am of the firm belief that it sees its responsibilty in life as personally pollinating every female English Elm within eastern New England. Watching it in the wind is like seeing a smoldering fire being fanned, except the clouds coming off it are yellow.

But, the rains are coming, and all the pollen will wash away in lemon jello colored streams, leaving nothing but a few mysterious puddles of dried pigment behind to confound newcomers.