There was a heatwave, not unlike this one. I was living in Bowling Green then, my sister was spending the summer with me, taking classes, and we were fiends for tennis. Boys wouldn’t play with us. Well, they would, but they didn’t like it.
We hit the courts one fine bright noon. Kathy remarked how deserted it was. We had our pick of courts with the sun bearing down on them, our little water bottles sweating in our hands. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.
“Inside, where they belong,” I replied. “You know people are dropping like flies, right?”
“Huh? “
“This heat, it’s killing people from Chicago to Memphis and anyone with sense is in the air conditioning, if they can find it.”
She looked blank, I shrugged, like it was of no more importance than if I was passing along something interesting I had just read about King Tut’s tomb. We played three sets of tennis, and feeling fine, but not total idiots, decided maybe we should go in search of some air conditioning, too.
We gathered our cans of balls, our tennis rackets and tiny tennis towels, our skimpy water bottles and took ourselves off home.
What I remember most about that afternoon is this. We were young, not too bright, and as fit as we ever were or ever would be. We were golden.
I write this in a chair that rocks, swivels and is in possession of a matching ottoman upon which my feet rest. The sprinkler rakes the big windows to my right, but I am not going out there any time soon to turn it off. I calculate the window of safety in which I might venture out to save my plants. It is a grave kind of arithmetic, even though, while it is hot, I have been hotter, and I am not sure it is so awful out there. I mean, it feels bad, but not that bad. Yet, I peek through the drawn blinds — no I don’t, I wrote that for effect — and take my pulse and try to remember when I last hydrated.
Because now I’m old.
Decidedly unfit.
And if I am honest, a bit of a scaredy cat.
There have been medical issues, not many or long-lasting enough to say I have a (fill in the blank) condition. But I creep around like maybe I do. I stay out of hot tubs, am cautious in a sauna, I weigh up my stamina for a walk around the neighborhood.
As if I could walk around neighborhood, anyway. I am almost recovered from a wonky hip issue, one that has vexed me since Christmas. The pain has migrated all over the place and is now, I think, in the last and only place left to be. And I am so much better. I can pick stuff up off the floor now. But it has gotten my attention.
I suppose I’ll never hold another tennis racket. I can’t get a bead on pickleball, and I suspect it is a pride thing. And while I have never been the biggest fan of summer, I have a soft spot for the girl I was once in it. The one with that backhand, the mean second serve. That one, who thought nothing of tennis at high noon, and 96 degrees. That one, who was always game, even if she wasn’t always best suited for the weather. I want a piece of her back.
She would be out there right now, mulching or pulling weeds, She wouldn’t care if it was hot. She would be at the nurseries this afternoon, looking for plants. Come home. Dig some holes. Maybe I need to quit twitching the curtains and just go out there to meet the day, whatever kind of day it is. If I only make it to the porch to drink iced tea, well, that is something, too.
Greta McDonough 