These are indoor days. And nights. I have in my career written press releases advising the elderly and people with breathing disorders, such as asthma, to stay out of the sun and keep cool, preferably indoors. I am not that "eld," and my asthma is not severe, but it doesn't take long for me to feel miserable when the temperature approaches 90. So I stay indoors puttering around trying to do something useful. Like remembering what life was like before air conditioning.
Growing up in Jersey City, I didn't really notice how hot it was. Perhaps kids are immune to the heat, perhaps it was early training in stoicism. But this time of year, as long as I didn't have to go to school, I just didn't care much about anything else. But the old people in our neighborhood, perhaps as old as I am now, had to deal with the heat as well as they could, in an era when owning even an electric fan was a luxury. After the sun went down, practically every house had a cluster of people sitting on the front steps -- or stoops as they were called -- and some would be sitting in dining chairs that had been carried from inside the house. They also carried out pitchers of lemonade, real lemonade with the rinds of the lemons still floating among the ice cubes. As darkness came, so did the mosquitoes. Every household had a large bottle of citronella, which they applied generously to the children. Also for the children were punks, sticks that looked and smoked like incense that we could light and wave around. They supposedly kept away the mosquitoes, but perhaps their real purpose was to allow us the pleasure of waving the smoldering sticks in the dark, making figure eights and being happy, because we playing with fire.
(The photo was taken in Manhattan in 1930 by John Muller. It's in the Museum of the City of New York.)
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