Nothing cools the savage heat like visions of icicles past.
My cool reminder came from a sheet of newsprint my father handed me. The Thompsons had ventured south to Tampa this past weekend. My grandmother, a little Cuban woman about yay tall, is under Hospice care now and things don’t look too good. We wanted to go down and see her, maybe for one last time.
It was a somber occasion, yet joyous at the same time. My family has that way about us. Nothing gets us down too much, and we’ll find a way to see the bright side on the darkest of occasions.
Or maybe the heat was too much for our brains to handle.
We suffered. Tampa is not a place to visit in August.
During Tampa summers, the heat gets so bad that the asphalt on the roads gets soupy like chocolate syrup. Popcorn kernels burst just sitting around in a jar. And in my mother’s house, where there isn’t air conditioning, it’s like being a rotisserie chicken. My mother has believed since the oil crisis of the Jimmy Carter years that air conditioning was just a passing fad, and that one day we’ll have to all give it up.
I tell her that won’t be until maybe 2189, and she might as well spoil herself a little now, but she’s not budging. We argue about it as the dog climbs into the refrigerator. (My mother’s well-taxed refrigerator can be heard crying at night.)
We made it one night at my mother’s before exiling ourselves to my aunt’s, where air conditioning is in plentiful supply.
But I also got chills when my dad handed me a newspaper about the great snowfall of 1977, when the white stuff actually fell on the streets of Tampa. I was almost 5 years old that January when a rather intense cold snap gripped the nation, and I still remember the dusting of snow that covered the ground like the saddest icing job any cake had ever seen.
At my house, there was barely enough to scoop up in your hand, but to me it had been a blizzard — a massive snowstorm that painted this green Florida landscape an uncharacteristic white. It was glorious — the first time I had ever seen snow. Winter in Tampa usually meant you needed to wear a little longer length of shorts and that you only stood a 30 percent chance of heat stroke on any given day. We’d had freezes that caused icicles to dangle off of orange trees, but never anything falling from the sky like this. Never!
So there I was in the sweltering heat, the hairs on my arms igniting like candle wicks while I read the article and thought back to that glorious day. We had loaded up in the car and headed out to the boonies where the snow was thicker. There it had really come down, and the snow banks in the fields couldn’t have measured any less than 2 cm high. It was incredible. On the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, in an expansive cow pasture, we all hunched over the winter wonderland and scooped up the melting ice crystals to roll them for a snowman.
He was about the size of a G.I. Joe figure, and the thin coating of snow had picked up so much dirt that the snowman looked like a tiny little hobo.
Yet, it was magical!
There’s never been another day like it in this great state of mine. I’ve seen flurries, but otherwise my freezer has snowed better than Florida has.
And on a blistering hot Tampa day, when the heat index was topping the boiling point of copper, it sure was refreshing to think about it. It brought goose bumps to my arms, although that also could have been the dehydration mixed with heat exhaustion coming on.