Summer in the Cities

Eight o'clock on a July night in Wisconsin and I just resettled with my laptop in a deck chair out on the front porch of my old Victorian. The air is so thick with humidity some moisture meters have been reporting rain in the city. But it's not raining; rain has a soul. This present turpidity and turgidity is soulless. No one delights in this. This swollen tumescence of weather is the unforgivable aspect of summer. It is summer's fatal flaw.

Someone asked me if it was as hot as Cairo yet, and I had to say no, but much worse. The heat in Egypt is such dry heat. Sitting here on the front porch with a chilled glass of Chardonnay and a hardcover atlas between my lap and the heat of my laptop, perspiration is running in parallel rivers down my stomach. In Cairo, feluccas are pushing off from the banks of the Nile down on the corniche. Lovers are glittery eyed in anticipation of an hour's reprieve from the moral laws of the land. Kisses are stolen and never returned.

Madison is so far from Cairo entire civilizations must be lost between their circumstances. There is nothing here that isn't green. I walked through a woods on my lunch hour today and inhaled a smell that was between humus and pipe tobacco. It's the smell of fecundity, the scent of rot, the odor of eros and thanatos rolled into one cigar and smoked. Too much life becomes so easily too much death. The vines in my garden after one weekend away are choking each other. The rose bush I've tried several times to eliminate from along the stepping stone path through my garden has triumphed again, and the calves of my bare legs are scratched and bloody from her thorns: a rite of passage.

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age." Dylan Thomas, a Welshman, must have had a premonition of Wisconsin summer in his blood when he wrote that. I have come, in my three+ years here, to despise the prolific growth. Gardens seem like the people here, too big, too blousy, too frowsy frumpy flatulent. Everything smells, including now me. I sit here with my laptop and my glass of summer wine, and the glass is sweating as freely as I but at least it does not smell; I am of the rank earth, though, and my own green age is upon me.

"And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/my youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Sometimes I drive through the small winding roadways of rural Wisconsin astounded at the vegetative lushness and I wonder how it would look to my friends who've spent their whole lives in Egypt. Would they be even more convinced that we Americans are the most spoiled and selfish people on this little spinning globe we share?