“Who goes out in the midday sun?
“Mad dogs and Englishmen”
This little couplet runs through my brain every year when the temperature in SoCal inches towards 100 and I recall the land of my birth. There, in the halcyon days before the climate went berserk and triple digits invading Buckingham Palace became almost commonplace, something quite extraordinary happened: pretty much any time the sun put in an appearance, no matter how brief, every piece of turf, no matter how minuscule, was instantly covered with sweating bodies roasting painful shades of reddish pink, slowly turning as if on an invisible communal spit. “Carpe solem” might be their motto: seize the sun.
Let us now leave my ex-countrymen, and turn instead to the suburban back yards of the US where the cry rings out, “I’m too hot, Mom, it’s too ho-o-t, Mom, MOM, I said, ITS TOO HOT!” (As if the current heatwave had been entirely mom’s idea . . .) Here are a few of my favorite things to do with hot, crotchety children:
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