Enjoying the heat, for a while

— Photo by Judson McCranie

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I love air conditioning, as I suspect most people do. We may be bankrupted by having so many cooling devices in our old house, but, hey, one is an environmentally friendly -- relatively! --  a heat pump. Of course, with most of our electricity still generated by fossil fuel, we help heat up the world with our air conditioners.

Still, from time to time, I look back fondly to those dog days of 60 years ago when we sat in a screened-in back porch with a cool slate floor reading and talking in a desultory way in the humid heat with the soft drone of the insects and the whisper of the southwest wind in the oak trees in the background. And how pleasant it was to bring our first (and surprisingly heavy) portable TV out to the porch so we could watch the likes of baseball, Perry Mason and political party conventions in the semi-outdoors, often with Popsicles slicking our hands, though my parents’ steady smoking reduced these pleasures a tad.

It was lovely, to a point, being languid. We lose something in being more and more cut off from the feel of the seasons. Now I’ll go back inside again from the front porch. Hot out here

Illustration of urban heat exposure via a temperature-distribution map: Blue shows (relativel) cool temperatures, red warm, and white hot areas.