As I sit here typing this, sweat is accumulating in the inner crook of my elbows and dripping down onto the desk – making it difficult to not slouch, since I’m basically propped up my elbows, and with the moisture, my elbows keep sliding. This whole week has been hot, and the only saving grace is that at least its not a humid heat. At night I’ve been sleeping with arms and legs splayed out, no sheets, and I’ve given up blow drying my hair in the morning. Instead I’ve just been putting Sally Herberger’s Style Primer for Wavy Hair (highly recommended) in and letting it air dry.
Everything has slowed down – we have had salad every night for dinner because we don’t want to turn on the stove. People move at a languorous pace, trying not to expend energy. Even the rigid morning joggers have slowed their paces. People are staying off the roads as much as possible because of the high gas prices, and the streets are emptier than usual. It’s a quiet, dry week, and if it weren’t for the birds in the palm and pomegranate trees there would be no noise. Inside the house, the animals are all laid out on the tile floors, trying to stay cool. Abby keeps making funny squeaking noises in her sleep, and her paws slide back and forth as she dreams of running. The cats are like accordions – I had no idea they could stretch so long – particularly Phantom, who seems even more accordion-like because he has black and gray tiger stripes.
I feel like I should be in some place like colonialist Sri Lanka (back when it was Ceylon) – with a study that opens out onto lush greenery with gigantic leaves, birds, and the not so distant sound of the ocean. I’d sip on an iced milky drink, and do all my writing on a typewriter. I’d write about jungle stories, and brave explorers, and then at night, we’d light lanterns and burn mosquito repelling incense.
Hot summers and incense always remind me of Beijing when I was growing up. The nights were so hot they were heavy – at dusk people would leave their tiny apartments and go to the breezy green parks, where trees had kept things shaded during the day and the heat didn’t radiate off the concrete. To keep even cooler they’d wear the lightest things they could find, and it wasn’t unusual around sunset to see couples walking down the street, both in cotton pajams – thermos of tea swinging – heading off to Ritan Park. In our complex (QiJiaYuan) the elevator operators and a handyman or two would gather in the lobby of our building, sitting on stools with their jars of green jasmine tea – and they’d smoke cheap cigarettes and liaotianr (literally to “chat away the day”). I’d stretch out on a stoop with a fan made of folded pages of the China Daily and listen to their winding conversations. To repel mosquitoes, they burned a special coiled snake of incense on the windowsill, and as it burned it glowed in the dusk, and smoked a green musky smell that I can recall perfectly. Sometimes if they didn’t have incense they sent me to pluck wisteria blossoms from the vines that grew outside, and they’d burn the petals in a metal lunch box. If I begged hard enough or said something funny, they’d let me light the match, and I’d prop myself up on my elbows and watch the purple and white petals begin to smoke and singe – and the smell that it gave off was acidic but potently perfumed.
