By ten this morning the thermometer on the porch post read 93, and the air had that wet-towel weight that makes Pepper flop on the hardwood floor in the hall and refuse to move. Lila asked if we could go to the park. I looked out at the shimmer coming off the street and said, very cheerfully, that we would go at seven tonight. This is July in Orangeburg. You don't fight it. You rearrange your day around it, and if you do it right, the indoor weeks can be some of the gentlest of the year.
Moving the day to the edges
Most of our outdoor life now happens before nine in the morning or after seven at night. Ben is already out the door early for fieldwork, so Lila and I take the cool hour for ourselves. We water the herb pots on the back steps, walk Pepper to the corner and back, and do any errand that involves a parking lot. Saturday farmers market trips happen as soon as it opens, and we are home before the tomatoes in the bag start to sweat.
The middle of the day belongs to the inside of the house. I do my bookkeeping work at the kitchen table, Lila builds elaborate block towns on the living room rug, and the blinds on the west side stay shut from noon on. It took me a couple of summers to stop feeling like we were hiding. Now it just feels like siesta with better plumbing.
Keeping the house itself comfortable
Last August we got a $312 electric bill, the worst we've ever had, and it shook something loose in me. Since then we have done a handful of things, one at a time, and the house holds its cool noticeably better this year:
- Blackout curtains in the bedrooms, hung last summer. The bedrooms stay dark and several degrees cooler through the afternoon.
- Sealed attic ducts, done last July for $380 after a free energy audit found leaks. Cold air now goes into rooms instead of the attic.
- More attic insulation, added last November. Our heat pump's ducts live up there, so this mattered more than I understood at the time.
- A smart thermostat, installed in June for $119 after a rebate from our utility. It eases the temperature up a couple of degrees while we're gone and brings it back down before we get home.
I won't know what July and August cost us until the bills come, and I am trying not to check the usage chart every morning like a stock ticker. What I can say is that the house feels steadier. The back bedroom no longer turns into an oven at four o'clock.
The ceiling fan rule
Fans cool people, not rooms, so ours run only when someone is in the room. Lila has become the fan police and will march back down the hall to switch one off. I pay her in praise and, occasionally, a popsicle.
Cooking without heating the kitchen
The oven is mostly retired until September. We plug the slow cooker in on the screened porch, where it can heat the outdoors instead of us, and we lean on cold suppers: tomato sandwiches, cucumber salad, boiled shrimp from the Costco run chilled in the fridge, pimento cheese on crackers. The toaster oven handles anything that truly needs browning. Ben grills a couple of evenings a week once the sun drops behind the pecan trees.
A pitcher of sweet tea and a pitcher of plain iced water live side by side in the fridge. Lila is allowed the tea at supper only, which she treats as a great privilege.
Keeping a seven-year-old happy inside
This is the real work of July. A few things that have carried us through:
- The library, twice a week. I may have left my job there, but I did not leave the building. It is cool, it is free, and the summer reading program gives Lila a little paper chart to fill in.
- A project that lasts all month. This year it is a cardboard dollhouse for her toy animals, built room by room on the porch with tape and old cereal boxes.
- Frozen everything. Grapes, blueberries, banana coins dipped in a little peanut butter. A tray of these buys a solid quiet half hour.
- A cool bath at four. It resets the afternoon grumpiness for both of us.
- The evening walk as the payoff. When it finally drops into the eighties, we all go out, Pepper included, and wave at the neighbors doing exactly the same thing.
None of this is glamorous. Some afternoons are long, and there was one Tuesday this month when we both cried over a lost puzzle piece. But July has a rhythm once you stop asking it to be May. The cicadas start up at dusk, the porch fan ticks overhead, and I sit on the steps with a glass of tea while Lila chases lightning bugs in the side yard. That part, I would not trade for any amount of cooler weather.
