Hitting the wall of summer

Friday morning we have frost (I see it on the used cars next door, but it doesn't hit my tomatoes three blocks away) and by Monday the temperature hits a sticky 26°C (79°F). This is Ontario.

My apartment is unbearable. The fan just blasts hot air in my face all day.

I meet John, Mina and Barney for an evening walk with all the summer trimmings. Everyone has gravitated to the Speed River as if sight of water could cool us. We stand in a long line to buy ice cream cones at The Boathouse. Mina raves about the Creamsicle flavour. I get a scoop of banana under a scoop of chocolate. Under settling dusk, white dandelion balls spread like a supercluster of galaxies across the dark grass.

On the way home I stop at the garden, where several others are taking advantage of the cooling twilight, but the mosquitoes are maddening. I just check a few things, pulling up more bindweed shoots. Hurrah for the peas germinating!

Angelica with its needy taproot isn't taking the heat so well. The rain barrel system hasn't been working, so I drive home and bring back a pail of water. En route from the car, the handle breaks and half the water sloshes down the sidewalk. I have enough to irrigate the angelica, but nothing else. A new moon nestles above the sunset city.

Before going home, I go down to the turnaround at the bottom of Kingsmill Avenue and get out of the car to see if toads are singing in Eramosa River Park, but evening is silent. I'm hit with a heady fragrance of linden flowers, but don't know where it comes from. In the sweaty purple sky, several stars twinkle, a planet gazes plainly, and a single small bat flutters.

It hits me why Lewis Carroll wrote, "Twinkle, twinkle little bat."

My bedroom air conditioner, at least, is working, providing a cool haven for sleep. Today is supposed to go up to 30°C (86°F).

John, Barney and Mina

An interesting life

At the office I chat with a man who reveals some strange adventures of his life. I would place him in his late 60s.

He has survived five house fires.

He left home at age seven after his father beat him up, walking from Toronto to his grandfather's farm, where his mother and brother joined him a few months later.

When he was nine a coal oil lamp got knocked over. This was the second house fire. His mother and brother died in it. My acquaintance survived by jumping from a second-floor window. He shows me scars from burns covering his left shoulder and upper arm.

He spent the rest of his early life in foster homes and orphanages.

He had a fear of heights and wanted to overcome it. While living in an orphanage on the east side of the Don Valley, he climbed to the top of Bloor Street Viaduct. His initials are still there, he says.