Scenes from the Journey: Hot, Hotter, Hottest

This heat. This heat. You'd think a child of the Midwest would understand it. Would welcome, even, the opportunity to re-experience the discomforts of childhood.

On hot, humid days like this, the five of us children (long before the sixth was born) would wander along the short, untraveled asphalt road beside our house. At the edges of the road, where the tar was thinnest, it would blister into black bubbles that we popped with our toes. Could we have popped them with our fingers? Or a stick? In my mind it is eternally our toes that do the popping, and the soles of our summer feet were black with tar. This was before I was six, for when I was six we moved to the house on Wilson Street where we lived (always renting, never buying) until after I had married and moved to—talk about heat—the Southern U.S.

When I was a teenager I enrolled in the 4-H Club for its summer workshops that taught farm boys how to raise livestock and farm girls how to cook and sew. The programs were open to the town kids as well (there were no "cities" in our county), since the same futures (farming and "homemaking") were in the cards for most townies as well.

Each year the projects became more difficult, with the idea that during five years of 4-H you would progress from muffins to biscuits and on to three-layer cakes. The boys would start with a shoe-box of baby chicks and in five years would be raising calves for the market. What the organizers failed to take into consideration in their programming—or maybe they knew it all along—was adolescent laziness. How many projects were handed over to the mothers the day before, say, that finished garment was due?

For my final year of 4-H sewing I made a slim lilac linen dress, sleeveless, with a mandarin collar. Instead of a back zipper or a front closure, the pattern I chose called for a row of one-inch buttons that ran from the left armpit to the hem. Probably a dozen buttons in all. It was not the best pattern for many reasons, but I'm sure I picked it out myself, probably against my smart mother's wise advice. Buttonholes were, of course, to be hand-made. You slit the fabric precisely (twelve times) and covered the raw edges using the aptly named buttonhole stitch. Twelve times. Twelve times faultlessly.

I have no idea how many buttonholes I actually completed on my own. Two, maybe? But the deadline was near. My mother, a skilled seamstress who dressed her three daughters until we went off to college, was torn between the horror of watching my clumsiness, my grubby fingers (it was hot, remember, summertime in Indiana), my lack of patience and my waning interest in the task—torn between that horror and the shaming possibility of cheating by helping me out. Faced with hand-finishing ten more buttonholes in one evening, I was all for the cheating.

The buttonholes got finished and the dress was submitted. I doubt very much whether I was sufficiently grateful for Eileen's work. It would take a lot of gratitude to compensate for the hours (on deadline, remember?) she spent finishing those stupid buttonholes.

On the other hand, who knows how much truth there is to this version of the story? It's how I remember it, but as you age, memories become nothing but anecdotes carved in granite; the actual memories are gone. So maybe I finished all twelve of those buttonholes by myself and my present self-flagellation is pointless.

What I do remember fully is how we dressed in the summer heat. This was the late 40s and early 50s. Dresses were what we wore, of course, not pants, for school and for all kinds of public gatherings (church, bridal or baby showers, parties). Stylish crinolines poufed out our full skirts, which fell from tight bodices.

So here you are. You're wearing a bra, a full-length nylon slip, a dress with a tight-fitting bodice and a full swing-y skirt held out by a scratchy, highly starched crinoline of tiered stiff muslin. You are wearing stockings (hosiery) that will be ruined above the knee by the rubbing of the starched crinoline. The stockings are held up by a garter belt or, more likely, are attached to the four rubber-and-metal fasteners dangling from your girdle, which is rubbery and not made for breathing in any sense of the word.

You are wearing dressy shoes. And just before you leave the house, you slip onto your already sweating hands a pair of thick white cotton gloves, which you will of course wash immediately once you get home so they will dry in time for your next outing. For true elegance you might prefer to wear your lacy white crocheted gloves, which will leave patterned indentations on your hands when you remove them.

The weather, just so you know, is in the high 90s, and the humidity is such that after you take a shower (in our house a bath, since we had no shower) you might as well save yourself the effort of drying off, because you won't be able to tell the difference between wet-from-the-bath and wet-from-the-weather.

I try to remain aware of the cultural requirements of my past as I complain crankily about this summer's heat waves in Toronto. Even when I am dressed for an outing, my clothing does not include a girdle, stockings, or white gloves--for which I am most grateful.

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