Hot & Sour Summer
by Bernard Greenwald

The evenings have become delightfully cool, accompanied at my house by the sounds of peepers and other frogs from the pond at the VFW pond across the street. The red bee balm in our large yard has just finished blooming, but earlier in the summer, in the daytime, it was alive with fat bumblebees, butterflies and the occasional yellow hummingbird, not much bigger than the bees. Usually the presence of a swarm of bees elicits some anxiety on my part, but these fellows were so busy caressing the flowers, I could stand with my face inches from them, observing their work, without any fear of attack. I spent some time at this every day.

In the background, the tintinnabulation of the fountain in my little pool, purchased at a garden center in Kingston, accompanied these insect workers. The plants I'd installed earlier around its edges were thick and profuse, their tendrils delicate under the canopy of the tall papyrus plant that luxuriated in its cool water. Every year it becomes the home of several frogs who mysteriously appear, posing in the water through the summer, and then disappear in the fall. These are my Edenic waters, and when the weather is pleasant I often gratefully compare my immediate surroundings in summertime Red Hook to Paradise.

It is easy to forget, however, that this summer was not always so friendly. We had torrential and persistent rains earlier, causing flooding that so saturated a large maple in our yard that a huge limb came crashing to the ground only feet from our house. After that, there was a period of weather hotter and more humid than anything I've ever experienced in the United States, four tee-shirt days where I could work in my studio for only an hour or two at a time before I had to retreat to our air-conditioned living room to revive myself.

I was reporting daily events to my son Ben, who was studying abroad this summer, and as I reviewed our emails, came across the following rather extraordinary account. I usually try to be reassuring with my young offspring, so its frankness surprised me.

Dear Ben,

I left our house for my daily walk today before realizing how terribly hot it was. As I walked along Route 9 I hardly noticed that it was devoid of other pedestrians. Before me, the sidewalk was a blazing white strip of shimmering electricity. As I passed the Golden Wok restaurant, the heat was so intense, my eyeglasses burst into flame. Luckily, Mrs Chen, one of the proprietors of the restaurant, was standing at its window, and seeing that I was in distress, she rushed outside with a steaming bowl of hot and sour soup, a double, family-sized order, which she compassionately threw over my head to douse the flames, The hot soup was so much cooler than the torrid ambient temperature that, grateful though I was no longer to be on fire, I began to shiver from its comparative chill. However, in the hot sun, the succulent mushrooms and tree fungus that impart to the soup its fragrant richness, stuck to my head and dried immediately.

My silhouette as seen through the smoke — with the dried vegetables appended to my head — must have been very shocking, because it caused several motorists on Route 9 to careen into the rear of the vehicles in front of them, leaving long strips of glistening black and foully aromatic melted rubber on the road. Feeling dazed, I made my way back to our house, closed myself into my air-conditioned refuge, put my feet up, and tried to calm myself with a cool drink.