Life with Ivanny and Clothilde puts me in mind of lazy summer days spent with my grandmother.
In the hot and humid south before every building was refrigerated, people and animals moved slowly lest the exertion of too much energy add to the overall stickiness of everyone in sight. Houses were shaded with trees and porches, the deeper the better. Lights were off, the houses dark to suggest cool, and windows raised to capture any breeze foolish enough to happen by. A floor fan was not an accessory of attractiveness but of necessity, moved and angled and tilted until it covered the most possible area -- and if the sheers blew like Marilyn's dress then the kids were even happier with the results.
The coolest time of the day, mornings, were for required activity - us kids shooed outside to play while Ma-ma languidly went about her housework humming a tune with no name. The straw broom was slowly pushed across the floor, motes hanging in the heavy air cut with swaths of yellow sun. The warm wet laundry hung to dry on parallel lines stretched between oaks, also anchor of a rope swing extraordinaire.
While we romped and galloped and screamed with the neighbor grandkids, Ma-ma would tie on her apron, bring out the flour and heat up the oil, and soon we'd be called home by the smells of biscuits (the real deal, not a la Bojangles), fried chicken, fresh peas and corn bought direct from Ma-ma's dealer who lived north of town just south of the state line down a dirt road in the sweetest little house you've ever seen. My brothers would be sent more than once to wash their hands as I'd hear my mama arrive in the driveway on her lunch break. We ate this, the largest meal of the day, at the dining table on the big screened porch on the east side of the house, but at this hour there was no sense hiding from the sun and so we ate and sweated and hoped for breeze.
After lunch Mama would go back to work and Ma-ma would wash the dishes (always in hot water, how else would they get clean??) filling the house with Lemon Joy. And then came the most dreaded time of the day. The Nap. During the hottest time Ma-ma liked to take a nap and wanted to safeguard my brothers from heat stroke, so she would lie on her bed and put each of us on a separate doubled quilt on the wood floor with instructions to sleep. I'd turn onto my side and read my book (being the oldest had its benefits) while she read (usually the same freakin’) stories to my brothers, hoping to bore them into sweaty unconsciousness. It never worked but she tried everyday, and thinking back I remember that it really was cool and peaceful lying on the floor in her bedroom after the sun had started its swing to the west.
Finally giving up the idea of the nap, for us or herself, Ma-ma would release us from our patchwork cells and we would all haul into the living room, where we'd lounge in the various chairs and sofas enthralled by the 19 inch black and white and the goings on of Rachel, Erica (that witch!), Ada, and other residents of Pine Valley, Bay City, et al... "As sands through the hourglass..."
While I swiveled through the adventure of my latest library find, a daily joke of my brothers would be to squeege a thin steamy leg across the leather of the sofa - aaah, that farty sound and the ultimate convulsive giggling never got old.
Between 3 and 4 the sun was finally west enough that Ma-ma would let the boys back out to terrorize the neighborhood. I would stretch out on the sofa to read while Ma-ma crocheted until Mama came home at 5:30. After a dinner of cold leftovers - mmm mmm congealed chicken gravy! - we would sit in gliders on the patio at the north of the house, well shaded from the setting sun, and fan ourselves with that staple of every local church - a hymnal-sized square of card stock glued onto a big popsicle stick, sponsored by a local funeral home and emblazoned with a beautiful little blonde girl in her special church outfit (of Easter or Christmas or whenever we'd happened lift the handy hand fan) complete with bonnet - until the mosquitoes drove us inside.
Wash rinse and repeat.
And so it feels here in this house... like the 1960s... where summer never ends.