Too Hot to Write about What I Remember -- Bill's Challenge

[Gita]

I started to write about a childhood memory that involved large Russian uncles in heavy overcoats and plump Romanian aunties bent over stoves as they baked bread and Purim pastries, but who can stand to write such stories in 104-degree heat?

I tried to write about my first orgasm and other nervous truths, but those prickly feelings melted and ran down my legs on this sweltering day, and I couldn't finish my thoughts.

I set out to tell you about a life in a colder clime than the one I live in now -- of snow and ice and swimming across a purely cold, blue-black Canadian lake. You would think that such memories would bring relief, but the day blew in under the door and around the window seals, dampening the curls around my temples and pasting the back of my shirt to my skin.

I stood in the open refrigerator doorway, eating a watermelon by digging my fingers into its wet, sweet flesh.

The ice maker clattered and cola-can sweat ran down the Coke Zero six-pack and the boiler-room hiss of backyard cicadas drowned out the words I was trying to find as if all language had fled to a distant, more temperate zone.

[Harry]

I'm not sure what the challenge was but I recognize some things here from the Kansas one. An entirely different take and maybe even a little more sweltering.

[Bill Floyd]

I'm right there with you.  (107 here yesterday.  I can't believe I just wrote that.)  I, too, admire the way you brought something completely your own to the form and function of the challenge.    

[Teresa]

Your writing doesn't seem to have suffered a bit in all that heat.  Great visuals.  I wish I'd known you when we were younger, that we could have both been twelve and lived as neighbors together.  I only had two exotic friends (I consider Russian uncles and Romanian aunties exotic) growing up, one French and the other Japanese.  What made them exotic were the older family members surrounding them who still spoke in mysterious languages.  I was just telling my oldest daughter that I remember well my friend Shelly across the street, sitting on her living room floor that felt like France with all the soft-lipped French spoken over our heads.  We ate beef jerky and drank Coke while playing the game of Life.  One of life's greater moments.  Don't you miss those days?  Faved six.

[Angela]

Hot here, too, and it is distracting, indeed.  Your six is great.

[Gita]

There were instructions?????

[Mike Handley]

Outstanding writing, G. Unique and completely forgivable that you ... um ... failed to read the instructions. I like it when you go rogue!

[Sandra Davies]

Ah well we have unseasonal rain here ... floods and lightning strikes ...    Typically unique Gita take on this prompt.