I have dripped for two days in a row with the sweat of humidity. My hair has at times looked frightful. I use a common cliche because I have made a point of not looking in the mirror, but from the way it has fought going under a hat even though the roots were soaked with sweat, I know it is more than just bed hair. It is more likely witch hair.

This morning when I was working with the vacuum on the back porch at Mother’s – the regular one, not the wer.dry vac – I discovered it was not sucking. That sucked. Turns out someone vacuumed up TWO pencils and they were stuck and holding back a huge clot of lint, dirt and hair.  I would have sucked them out with the wet/dry vac, but the reason I had the regular one out was because I was sucking out the filter on the wet/dry one. So I dug for them with a fork. Screens on three sides of me and the sweat was running down my face. I could feel it pop out drop by drop, just the way I have watched chickenpox develop – one by one.

I mopped my face with my shirt because the paper towels were tooooo far to reach. I felt very down home and it didn’t feel bad. However, the Irish Spring body wash did feel better.

Are you still back on the chickenpox remark? Yes, I know it is an unexpected thing to hear. When Robert William was five, he got the chickenpox in kindergarten when we were at Wright-Patterson AFB.  He lay on his stomach without a shirt on on our bed and Der Bingle and I realized we could actually seen the individual pox form. A reddening, a widening, an upthrust . . . right out of little pale skin.

We were ooohing and ahhhing and Robert William was crying that he couldn’t stand it. It was like time-lapse photography in real time. We probably got bored, though, because he was covered with them. I don’t think our personalities were evolved enough that we thought to call him “pox boy” at the time. But it came to me now.

You know, I don’t think Quentin’s pox developed in front of our eyes; I think his came at night and he got up looking like a polka dot boy. We didn’t call him that, either, even though he was also covered head to toe with them. (And between toes)

I don’t know when we started designating people with an adjective, but we do it all the time now. Not that we’re nasty . . . each and every time . . . and sometimes we aren’t too creative, just blunt. And I don’t know if I want to devote any time to figure out when the watershed moment was.

I have gone off on a tangent; I was talking humidity and sweat. Quite possibly, I will meet with those two tomorrow because there are still lots of willow branches, and oh yes, the new chestnut limb – not to mention limbs on pine trees that need to be chopped off and roses that need to be cut back.

We need a good refreshing breeze to come through and dry out the air, but then again another branch might come down. You know, it just occurred to me, that willow could have come down with ice on it and that would have been fine fix to be in.