We had our first heat wave of the summer last week, but I’d seen the previews on Zoom, because two of my online Hebrew classmates live in Switzerland and Germany and they were suffering from the unrelenting, un-air-conditioned heat. Watching them on screen brought back memories of visiting my aunt in Paris, when I first discovered that Europeans don’t really believe in air conditioning. I spent those ten days in Paris, in August, desperately searching for ice cream and trying not to sweat to death. They tell me that heat intolerance is a side effect of my various autoimmune disorders, which is better than what I tell myself, which is that it’s a character flaw. Good people can stand the heat. Good people don’t need to hug their air conditioners for dear life all summer long.
When the heat wave finally came to Long Island last week, though, it turned out that the air conditioner in my bedroom wasn’t up to the job, especially when all of the other air conditioners on Long Island were on at the same time and the power company did brown outs to manage the demand. I spent one night trying to sleep in my room, listening to my poor air conditioner moan in pain every few minutes while I tossed and turned trying to find a cool spot, and then I brought my pillow and blanket into the living room and slept on the couch, directly under the big air conditioner. One side benefit of sleeping in the living room was that, every once in a while, I could look over and see Tzipporah sleeping comfortably in her bed across the room (she seems to be able to tolerate my presence as long as she thinks I’m asleep).
I’ve lived through plenty of heat waves before, but this one seemed to hit me harder than usual. Even sitting right next to the big air conditioner, I could feel the pressure in the air squeezing my brain and weighing down my limbs like concrete. I struggled to move, or even think, and for a few days I didn’t even try to accomplish anything.
Once the heat broke, though, I was able to go outside and visit my pawpaw tree, to see how he’d fared in the heat. Was it last year that the few fruits the tree was able to produce were eaten up by the birds? I can’t remember. So far, this summer’s fruit is having better luck, and for the first time we even have a three-fer, three pawpaws on one stem. There’s something about this tree that resonates with me. It struggles to produce fruit, and stay upright, but every summer, no matter how much failure or success it had the year before, it takes the risk to grow again. My familiar.
Thank you, Monsieur le Pawpaw, for giving me hope when I struggle to find it for myself. Keep growing!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 