ILL-ADVISED SUMMER SWEATER

I brought a sweater to a wedding I attended in El Salvador last year. I didn’t plan to wear the thing at the ceremony or reception, of course, but to one of the auxiliary events—a dinner on a beach.

I figured the sweater would be appropriate since it’s made of relatively porous material and has a faintly tropical, palm tree motif. I didn’t realize the weather would be hot enough to sizzle pupusas right there on the sand, even in April, even at nighttime.

So I didn’t end up donning the item at all during that trip and, in fact, have had only a couple occasions to drag the sweater out since. It’s an article of clothing intended for moderate, transitional weather, after all, and Earth is moving toward more of a perma-roast situation. I fear that light jackets are similarly endangered.

My father’s preferred expression for sweltering conditions: “It’s hot enough to boil an owl.”

Who knows why he says that. In his diphthong-deprived Arkansas accent, “boil” and “owl” almost rhyme. It’s when I hear such combinations of sounds that I wonder how the South gained its reputation for producing beautiful language.

Speaking of Arkansas, my husband, Frank, believes my childhood spent there has made me well-equipped to handle extreme heat and humidity. And though I detect a note of Yankee condescension in that assessment, I agree that I handle ungodly levels of mugginess better than Frank does. He lets a little thing like the temperature hitting 205 degrees make him enervated and irritable.

The first time I took him to my hometown, for example, it was during boil-an-owl season, and for that reason alone he showed an appalling lack of interest in my guided tour of notable sights, such as the poultry processing plant and the house where my old piano teacher lived. Frank didn’t even want to get out of the car to take a gander at Old Main on the University of Arkansas campus.

“I think I can see it from here,” he said, looking in the wrong direction.

When the topic of unbearable hotness has come up in conversations with friends in the years since, I have heard Frank say, “Yeah, but have you ever been to Northwest Arkansas?”

Reader, the two of us have vacationed in the deserts of Egypt.

For my own part, the hottest place I have ever been is my freshman year dorm room toward the end of an unseasonably scorching spring quarter at Northwestern University. That school, I hasten to add, is located just outside Frank’s hometown of Chicago.

From the building’s lack of air conditioning, I deduced that the Midwest was new to suffering prolonged heat spells. But if that was true, the region had taken to the fad with the zeal of a recent convert. Even I was reduced to a Frankist stupor.

Made of cinder blocks, the dorm seemed to absorb heat and radiate it at the same time. I swear the building emitted waves of unwelcome warmth across a two-block radius.

My runners-up for the title of Hottest Place Ever would have to be: Walt Disney World on the Fourth of July, the gym where we held my grandfather’s 80^th birthday party (how I envied the many senior attendees on beta-blockers that made them cold all the time), and, okay, fine, Arkansas in August.

Oh, and also Egypt.