Dad talked with me for 63 minutes about bedding and food and shampoo and vehicles for the wedding guests coming in a month, and about Cecilia’s food poisoning and the country’s ammunition shortage and increasing road rage and the weeks of 100-degree days.  Climbing the stairs to change after work, I felt the temperature rise with every step.  My west-facing home office had turned sauna: 90 degrees and rising.  (In Phoenix, Jeanette’s house rose to 109 when their AC quit.)  Our air conditioner hummed but pushed only warm air through the vents.  Dad complained about not sleeping at night and instead lying awake sweating and sticky and stuck.  I escaped to the basement, perpetually cool, but he and Mom have no escape.  A “bang” in their room startled them in the dark of night three.  “Lucille, get up and see what that was!” Dad instructed; he would have done it himself in earlier years, when he could move.  Mom found that the ceiling fan I had turned on the move the air had flung the metal trim off a glass blade into a wall, thankfully not hitting a mirror or a window, or them, so the fan had to be turned off.  Another thing for me to fix.  The floor fan I borrowed from Terry only transformed the sultry night into a hot hurricane.  Across the region, Home Depot and Lowes and other stores had sold out their indoor air conditioners, except for the models $400 and up, exceeding my budget, but I found at Target two tiny seven-inch-cube coolers that blow air over cold water, and I set them up for us bedside.  The repair technician will save us in two days.  The lack of air conditioning is a first-world problem, I know, but high temperatures can be deadly to 88-year-olds in any country, and I felt oppressed by both the heat and the responsibility of Dad’s well-being as I scurried to provide some relief, a bit of which the little water boxes brought by gently blowing cooler air on him all night, helping him sleep.  He has asked me to bring him a scraper, a pallet knife, a sanding block, and the spackle—he had resolved to fill the old banister holes in the wall above the chair lift, and I resolved to let him do what he could do before jumping in to do it myself.  The chair, unhappy at being stopped mid-rise, chirped continually at him as he worked.  But he succeeded, and thanked me for giving him a job he could do.  Dripping with sweat in my own chair, nervous about tonight’s pain and tomorrow’s root canal, I whined to Liddy about our woes, and she listened and affirmed and told me she was, at that moment, lying on her bed an ocean and a continent away listening to the waves lap the surf, and I asked her how she has been, and she said about the same, waiting for miracles but counting blessings.

(Pictured above: dried spackle ready to be sanded and painted, which Dad wants to do himself.)

(Pictured below: the ceiling fan glass blade metal trim.)