I feel lately as if I live in a perpetual state of unsettled stickiness. Inside, with the air conditioning, I can almost get comfortable, but even a brief jaunt outside, to take out the trash or fetch the mail, and I start to melt. I am doing my best to stay inside and avoid going out altogether, but that’s not always possible. This morning, for example, I had to leave the house to go to church, since my dad called Friday night to see if I would accompany a quartet on the piano. Then after church we climbed back into our little ovens on wheels – otherwise known as cars, and drove home. There is no shade anywhere near the church for parking, and I suppose if we were going to be perfectly environmentally friendly we would ride our bikes there because it’s barely over a mile away, but it is just too hot.

Yesterday wasn’t much better, since I spent most of it in away from home attending a conference on missions. The topics were interesting but most of the rooms we were in had no air conditioning. They set up fans to try to alleviate the heat, but all the fans did was make so much noise it became hard to hear people across the room during discussions. By the end of the day I was limp with exhaustion and all I’d done was sit.

This heat wave is lasting far too long for anyone’s liking, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of easing up on us any time soon. There has been only the lightest of breezes to give any relief, and that comes only at night – just barely enough to rustle the leaves on the trees but not enough to blow the hot air away.

Today has been a mix of emotional issues. I ended up pinch-hitting for the tenor line during one verse of the song the quartet was singing since the bass didn’t show and my dad could sing bass if I sang tenor. This was the first time I’ve been accompanist at the church that I felt as if I played the song well and wasn’t cringing through the entire thing hoping that no one was noticing all of my mistakes. It helped that I kept practicing the song as fast as I could at home because I had no idea how fast they would be singing and I wanted to be prepared, and they didn’t sing it as fast as I’d practiced. Our friend brought us a bag of peaches from her tree and we had a little black spider to amuse us during the service.

And this morning we found out that some friends of ours are going through an awfully emotional and difficult time right now, and my parents are wrestling with problems of their own, and for both extremes I feel oddly helpless and unable to do anything else except listen to what little I am told and do my best to not take sides. And tomorrow is our second anniversary but Richard left today for a weeklong intensive class down in Fullerton, and did I mention that it is disgustingly, mind-suckingly hot?