Currently 96; high, 100.
Haven’t had a summer like this for a while. Turned the grass brown in a week. Respite from mowing, but hard on the beans, the corn, the cattle. Still, not all that unusual, after all, we do live in Kansas.
I can remember buying our first air conditioner — a window unit for an upstairs apartment above the Humboldt Union in 1953 — because a newborn’s diaper rash wouldn’t heal in those 100-plus degree July days.
Also remember how ineffective the old swamp coolers were before the technology made its quantum leap. There have been 100-degree days and 90-degree nights in Allen County for as long as records have been kept — and certainly much, much longer.
Today it doesn’t matter for those of us lucky enough to have inside jobs.
And that reminds me that Africa is in the throes of another devastating drought. Cattle dying, dust blowing so thick the people shouldn’t get outside their tents for fear of clogging their windpipes and lungs with corrosive silicon. But they stand out in the swirling wind, all hopes of a crop gone, desperate for water, tending their goats and cattle, their only wealth.
There are no inside jobs in most of Africa. Where they exist, there is air conditioning only for the very few who are also very rich.
Think about Sudan and realize that the poorest among us in Allen County are rich as Croesus in comparison. There now, feel better?
Think on Africa and feel better
