Hot as Heck on the Deck

I’m basted in an exotic marinade of sunscreen and mosquito spray; I’m nearly crispy in a couple of places; I’m cooked to medium-well without a rotisserie in sight. With temperatures of late in the 30-degree Celsius range, I am already done with the heat wave, so done.

No relief from the heat for a while.

It’s too darned hot during the daytime for kids to play, except for the odd splashing coming from a neighbour’s pool, and even that only lasts for a short time, making the neighbourhood eerily quiet. You can watch the gorgeous petunias in the hanging baskets literally dehydrate in front of your eyes, while imagining the other blossoms in the garden desperately gasping for a good watering. People walking their dogs seem more like nocturnal bats, only venturing out at dusk when there’s finally some relief and the occasional whiff of a breeze. The smart ones escape to the lake or the air-conditioned mall or their basements. (I have even found the cooling attributes of slowly wandering the grocery store’s frozen food department to help.) Ah yes, the blatant reminders that I live in an arid resort town. With July’s raging temperatures to deal with daily and August thunderstorms (and possible lightning strikes) around the corner, I long for the summer rains that were part of living on the West Coast. Some summers there you rusted, others were humid but tolerable.

I definitely need one of these in the neighbourhood!

As much as I remember goofing around in the summer rainstorms in the neighbourhood park or squishing around through the wet sand at the beach as a child, it was the familiar tunes and rings coming from the travelling ice cream truck that really was synonymous with summer. Relaxing on my back patio with a tall glass of sangria or chilled white wine is delightful at times, but right now all I really want is that ol’ ice cream truck to pull up at the end of my driveway and announce a sale on ice cream bars and popsicles. I would so clean him out of goodies! It’s a dream, I know, given I live up in a quiet, hilly area of homes that are more likely to be visited by raccoons, coyotes and deer than Fudgsicle vendor or a facsimile. Too bad.

I hope my friends are handling the heat wave as best as they can. The wild fires that come with a duration of severe heat make me most anxious. Personally, our neighbourhood has had two close calls with “interface fires” over the last few years, and everyone in Kelowna still has stories around the fierce firestorm a decade ago which claimed over 200 homes in the area. So scary and so devastating for the people involved.

My remedy to deal with the heat? Escape back down to Vancouver Island for a couple of days and get re-acquainted with the delicious shade of the giant cedar trees and refreshing ocean air. I do hope I find an ice cream truck there too. That would just be about perfect – until it’s time to make the trip homeward to face the heat again.