Heat wave? You call this a heat wave?
By Mary Ann Cook
When, during a heatwave in this part of the world, I hear people complain, I laugh to myself. I spent some weeks in southern Florida during a real heatwave, ministering to a mother who, at 94, had just undergone three operations-- a pacemaker replacement and two hip replacements, since the first one didn't take.
She endured a lengthy, nightmarish hospital/rehab stay. But evidently so did the staff. She's not easy under the best of circumstances and this was far from the best. "I was persona non grata," she confided to me at one point, referring to her hospital stay.
Naturally she couldn't walk unaided. She progressed laboriously via walker and wheelchair with someone constantly at her side--me. The only other member of the household was my aunt, unsteady in her own right--she walks with a cane.
We three were tucked into one bedroom in my aunt's house because this is the only room that is air conditioned. The heat was a heavy burden, a presence that sapped every last bit of strength from the household. Cooking was slapdash: we dared not remain in the kitchen any longer than it took to prepare sandwiches, consumed, of course, in the command post.
I don't use war terms unadvisedly. I treated the time as a campaign, a war zone. After all, we were fighting for our sanity.
One morning while slipping through the kitchen, I saw that the oven had been turned on. I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought it was an accidental aberration from one whose eyesight was failing. But no, my aunt had stirred up banana bread and it was in the oven.
Did I mention that financially she is comfortable, if not wealthy? But, abiding by her waste-not-want-not coda, she had to use those over-ripe bananas-- all 30 cents worth of them. I was forced to do some re-evaluating: I always thought my mother was the loony one of those two.
Some people who live in tropical parts hire exterminators to periodically eradicate the bugs so the place is habitable for humans. My aunt prefers to do battle herself--in her own fashion. Not surprisingly, her place is crawling with varmints.
Ants cavort throughout the kitchen despite the plethora of traps awaiting them. Nighttime brings a different breed: Cockroaches are crunched underfoot in the dark by the bedpan brigade. Gnat-like things infest the kitchen drawers. Every time I thought I had gotten rid of several generations of them in the pasta drawer, a battalion of reinforcements encamped to take their place.
My mother was still hallucinating from drugs administered in the hospital. One night she announced with irritation that there were ants in her bed. I searched diligently but found nary a trace and finally convinced her of that fact. It was probably the only 2-by-6 foot area that didn't have some creature crawling through it.
It took all our patience and resources to get my mother up and moving on a morning. Even with a nurse's help it was late morning before the toilette was finished and then it was time for therapy or a feeding. This recouping regime allowed no time for socializing or niceties as was my philosophy.
"Don't ask anyone to come in," I urged. "They mean well, but they talk about their own problems and wear us out so much we can't handle our own."
"OK," said my aunt.
One Sunday on the hottest day of the heatwave, a woman came to the door with flowers directly from the church service. A lovely touch. An inviting offering. "Don't answer the door," I hissed.
"Come on in," said my aunt to the woman. And so she did.
Now in the room were four people, two twin beds, a dresser, a sewing machine, a Talking Books machine, a long bench with two suitcases on it, a straight chair, an easy chair, a wheelchair, a walker and a porta-potty. There were no clear passageways to either door because no inch of floorboard was left unencumbered.
This compacted space would pass no fire code in the land. Simple common sense would scream, "Don't add anything to this mélange." And yet my aunt had just urged another being--and another chair-- into this sardine-tin scenario.
I was prone on one of the beds in the only place in the house it was humane to be. "I'm fried," I said, by way of introducing myself, and immediately returned to horizontal. It had been a hard night, what with Mother's bedpan and hygiene routine interrupting sleep every few hours. None of us had had enough sleep.
I'll give her 10 minutes, I thought to myself, since I knew I was the only one willing to play Ugly Hostess. I closed my eyes and tried to envision myself elsewhere. It was hopeless. Our guest was well-launched into recounting her own exciting hospital stays when I applied my version of a scalpel.
"We really have to rest now," I said, getting up, teeth clenched so as not to scream out what was really on my tongue, the words, "Get out!"
"Oh, I'm not staying," the guest replied. And stayed. She completed the details of her third hernia operation, and then, after 20 minutes worth of goodbyes, actually left the premises.
I was still seething, so my aunt began to play the piano. The piano was outside the bedroom. "Don't sit out in that heat," I begged. "No, it doesn't bother me," she insisted. You try telling someone 90, purportedly of sound mind, what to do in her own house.
She played a few chords, was just getting into a rousing rendition of Jungle Rag when she started to shout and laugh all at the same time. "Ants are flying out of the piano," she squealed, sticking her head in the door. "They've nested there."
What with her sister's hospital stay, she hadn't played the piano for months. The insects, on the other hand, had. Liberal doses of Raid were sprayed and then we had another smell to contend with, joining the bedding and porta-potty aromas that lingered no matter how often changed or what kind of cleaning product was applied.
I went back to bed with mask over nose.
Whenever people complain about the heat here I laugh a lot, quietly, internally.
Mary Ann Cook is a Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
