Hot and Dirty

I have never been so dirty in my entire life.  WE have never been so dirty in our entire lives - collectively, as a family -- we are just plain dirty.  Every night we shower - exhausted.  Sometimes I come out of the shower, and I think, "I'm not sure I'm clean yet."  Sometimes Stephen comes out of the shower and I KNOW he's not clean yet. We really just laugh about it.  There is nothing else to do when there are five of us and the shower is 1 foot by 2 foot and we have a 10 gallon hot water heater.  Most days we do not even want hot water.  It is hot.  It is hot.  It is hot.  The heat index yesterday was 114.  The actual temp was about 102.  I think it was hotter in the house.  Tempers were short, but not at each other.  We're one of those rare families that do not fight while we work together.  But then suddenly in the late afternoon a storm came in that cooled everything off, and I have never been so thankful.  Tonight we stopped working when it was still light out, and the rain was lightly falling again.  We played a little basketball and talked about the plans for the rest of the week.  The sun peaked out from behind the clouds while it was still raining, and we almost giggled while we shot basket after basket.  Today four generations of Humphreys worked in the house.  Grandpa H was down and spent the day picking up messes, Dad H worked replacing the old wiring, Stephen was putting the flooring down in the attic, and the girls had little brooms and swept up sawdust only to throw it up in the air and catch it in their hair.  We are seeing progress.  New lights are hung and the final order from the home improvement store has been made.  Heating and air will be installed next week, and then it will be time to close the walls back up.  Last night I sat on the front porch during the rain and closed my eyes against the wind.  I used to sit there often with Grandma.  She had a great porch swing.  It faced the west - my favorite view of the landscape here.  When I was a kid, the front yard was filled with trees that us kids would climb.  There were cows across the street that would walk to the fence when we came out to see what we were doing.  It is a little different now.  A house were the cows used to be; no more trees in the front yard; and, the porch swing isn't back yet.  I sat there though and remembered how much I used to love to sit here with her.  She rarely stopped working until the evening after supper - usually around the time Marcia, the weather lady, was about to come on channel 14.  She would sit in the porch swing and just swing.  I always tried to ask her questions, but she was a woman of few words.  The porch was poured in 1948 when my  mother was 2.  A man came and painted the roof underside blue.  He told my mother, who even though was only 2 at the time remembers quite well, "I'm painting it blue like the sky."  Who knows how she remembers that.  It is still blue - it will always be blue.  I wonder what of this summer my girls will remember.  My mother remembers little of her father.  When Grandma and Grandpa had lived here only five years, my  mother's father died suddenly of a heart attack.  He didn't get up one morning to go do the chores.  Grandma had cooked his breakfast, and when she finally went to wake him, he was dead.  He died in his bed in the room which will be our living room.  In pictures, he looks very tall.  I asked Grandma about him one time and all she would say was, "the only thing wrong with Floyd was that he didn't live long enough."  She was 29 with two kids and a widow.  She stayed in the house though.  She stayed and Uncle Chettie was there to work the land.  She stayed because really there was nothing to do but stay.  At the bank today, one of the ladies asked if we had thrown our hands up yet and called it quits.  I replied, "several times."  But, really no matter how hot and how dirty we get, there really is nothing to do but stay.  Once we found out what home feels like -- why would we ever want to leave?