"Hot enough for you," we'd ask each other while shuffling sprinklers back and forth across parched lawns. "Oh, you know how the Midwest is... If you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes and it'll change," someone would eventually say. And change it did.
For the next ten days, we sizzled in 100+ degree, bone-dry weather. Neighbors greeted each other with grunts and nods as we zipped between our air-conditioned cars and our air-conditioned homes. The nightly news featured a grisly death toll, and we in Missouri shook our heads in despair as our state led the nation in heat-related deaths.
Even the living aren't safe in this heat. Air conditioner thefts rose and with them lethal encounters between burglars and protective homeowners. Shopping malls reported an increase in physical assaults between customers as hordes of folks, good and bad, flocked to partake in free climate control. Violent domestic crime escalated as tempers expressed themselves through the barrels of smoking guns.
The local power company sputtered along, overwhelmed by the unrelenting demand for electricity. Within moments of its first power failure, the CEO's wife received death threats over the phone.
So it has seemed utterly petty that while all this has been going on, while the heat has driven us to such barbaric acts, I have moped over dying plants, tenderly piled on more mulch to keep their roots cool, and misted scorched leaves in the hope that my ministrations will carry the garden through this heat wave. But then again, I am the gardener and my plants are my charges: callously abandoning them to this heat would be barbaric as well.
"Patience," I have whispered to my wilting begonias, urging them to hold out just a little bit longer. "Patience," I reply when my daughter asks how long it will be until the weather will grow cool again. "Patience," my husband and I have said to each other as we've watched our once deep green lawn blanch to a sickly shade of orangey brown. "This, too, shall pass."
