Tim and I have been staying in St. Petersburg for a few days preparatory to moving, tomorrow, to Bradenton, an hour south. On our recently-completed seven-day car trip, which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, we passed through the California desert, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, bits of Mississippi and Alabama, and finally into Florida.
It wasn't until Louisiana that we left behind the dry heat of the Western states, where temperatures had hovered at ninety degrees. Indeed, it was a hundred or more in Phoenix, where we stopped for lunch and companionship with my younger brother and his wife and step-son. I do not like dry heat, and was relieved to feel the sticky warmth of the Deep South. (Along with the change in humidity came a change in action and attitude. Texans drove fast and aggressively. Louisianians, by contrast, seemed relaxed, and restaurant servers called us "honey," "baby," "sweetheart," and so on.)
As it turned out, we witnessed a few distant thunderstorms in Texas. But not until Florida did it really start coming down. Indeed, we drove into St. Petersburg, the end of the road, literally under a cloud, a monstrous ebony construction that dropped rain like bullets. Some people would consider that a bad omen; to us, both rain lovers, it seemed a blessing.
We're staying at a St. Petersburg Air BnB rental in Old Northeast, a funky historical district of red-brick-paved streets, narrow sidewalks overhung with lush tropical foliage, gorgeous old homes and a general air of gentility and grace. Our rental is a one-bedroom unit detached from the owner's two-story home. I am sitting in a blue plastic Adirondack chair on the screened-in patio, next to a pool. A cup of iced coffee rests on a round wire table next to me. The pool glints blue in the occasional sun that peeks through the gray and white cumulonimbus clouds above.
A couple of dramatic thunderstorms have rolled in since we've arrived. Rain pounds, lightning blinks the sky bright, thunder alternately booms and cracks like the snap at the tip of a whip. The forecast calls for more next week. Neither Tim nor I complain; having moved from (until recently) drought-fried California, we're delighted when the sky opens up.
But it's the heat that makes the storms, and this area, interesting. Temperatures have stayed in the mid-to-high eighties; nothing like what we'll see in a month or two, but warm enough for a former Northern Californian.
I've long pledged allegiance to chilly weather. For thirty years I lived in San Francisco, a city famously cooled by fog. More recently, Tim and I lived south of that city, on the Peninsula. I found the dry summer heat there oppressive. I'd grouse to one and all that my body runs warm, so I value cooler climes.
Life is a master jester, so when it (and academia) placed Tim in grad school in Bradenton (he starts Monday), I just had to laugh. Cooler climes? Ha! But when, a few weeks ago, we visited St. Pete (not, I've been warned, "St. Pete's," which is to this city what "Frisco" is to San Francisco), I was struck by how much I enjoyed the tropical heat. To be sure, it's not the humid heat we'll get at the apex of summer, which may wind up feeling debilitating. (Two different natives have already lamented that we've arrived in the worst part of the year. Summer heat, as one put it, is "brutal.") But it's hotter than what we're used to, and in a different way.
Granted, even this current humid heat can feel slightly stupefying. Not for nothing the hoary cliche of the "sultry South." One tends to move more slowly, an animal response to conserve energy and prevent overheating. As with the physical, so with the mental: the mind tends to slow, too. Suddenly it's enough just to... sit. I've been out here for the past hour. Stunned by the heat, I've been content to gaze lazily at the activity around me.
Outside the screen, not far from me, a series of white pipes enter and exit the mechanisms of the pool's filtration system. Two lizards, one slightly larger than the other, have been resting on one of the pipes for nearly as long as I've been here. The dark-colored, larger one's throat area occasionally puffs out orange-red. The two of them have patiently clung, facing the ground, to a vertical pipe. They, too, appear heat-dazed, but what do I know of local fauna? They could be perfectly comfortable and chatting about dinner plans.
Earlier, a squirrel skittered atop a tall wooden fence beyond the pipes. He appeared surprisingly thin. Tim sensibly posited that the heat precludes the need for extra animal fat. It is also possible that there just ain't enough nuts around here to properly fill him.
Again: what do I know? In addition to relaxing my body, the afternoon heat has turned my mind to mush. I am therefore too lazy to take a stab at searching Wikipedia. And offering a plausible theory is, at the moment, well beyond my evidently diminishing mental capacities.
So, alas, is any ability to think of a snappy finish to this heat-soaked piece. So we'll just leave it at that, as I head into our temporary--and blessedly air-conditioned--home.
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