Postcards from a heatwave

Summer in fragments, summer in photos. How we summer in the city.

If summer were a color, it would be warm yellows and brilliant greens, but lately the atmosphere hangs in a muddled haze with no distinguishable color at all. It’s not like the eerie orange that descended on the city from thick wildfire smoke up north just two summers ago, but more of a milky haze that diffuses the sun and softens all the sharp edges.

I thought I was getting sick, but no, it’s smoke in the atmosphere.

It occurs to me to look up the air quality when an entire family of five wearing face masks walks by. AQI, 124. The source is more fires in Canada. No wonder my throat feels tight. Makes you question a runaway future where there’s endless source of money for wars but not for fighting climate collapse.

Above: City Island in lower Manhattan. Below: the courtyard at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

The haze has subsided this morning, but we’ve entered into another heatwave. Sizzling temperatures and blistering sun. It reminds me of summers as a child when we were so bored out of our minds, we’d crack open an egg on the scorching sidewalk to watch the translucent whites turn opaque. We had nothing else to do on those endlessly sticky days, but I guess the price of eggs is too expensive to waste on childhood experiments. That, and kids today are too tightly scheduled to stumble into the kind of resourcefulness that comes from pure boredom.

By noon, the view out my window is stark angles and clipped shadows. Some of our balcony crops are thriving in this intoxicating heat while others wilt and yellow around the edges. Gardening is a high-maintenance hobby, but I don’t mind fussing over my plants.

Aromatics from herbs linger and morph on my fingers as I move down the row of planters, weeding and picking off buds to promote more growth: the piney sharpness of rosemary, the sweet fragrance of shiso, the velvety scent of sage.

I baby the one full-size ripened tomato that hangs fiery red and plot my first tomato sandwich of the year with much anticipation. Tomatoes, as it turns out, are on my forbidden-to-eat list, but I don’t care—I plan to eat them this summer anyway.

I don’t think this is the hottest summer on record but the humidity has been oppressive this year. New Yorkers slow their usual hurried gait to a lethargic shuffle, wearing as little clothing as they possibly can. I’ve actually come to love summer wardrobes. I love painting toenails in jewel colors to admire them in sandals and slipping into tank tops and linen. But I swear I’m just one summer away from carrying a sun umbrella.

It doesn’t matter what you wear in this humidity though. Moisture hugs the skin and everything is heavy in the way it viscerally hangs in the air. Those are the days we escape to museums and stay indoors. Pay what you wish, if you can prove you live here. I’ll gladly wander in a museum until the chill from the AC settles in too cold, just for the pleasure of stepping outside agin and being enveloped in a rush of hot air.

My kids have had a few summer job shifts canceled because of a lack of pedestrian traffic outdoors and slower sales. Whether it’s the usual exodus of people with means summering in their second homes or the decrease in tourism because of a certain orange tyrant in office, you can feel the quiet.

The other week I found myself caught in a torrential thunderstorm, the kind that renders an umbrella useless. I ducked under the nearest scaffolding which is never more than a few blocks away because the neighborhood is in endless construction. The rain came down in violent sheets and I watched it gush along the curb in rivers and overwhelm street gutters. It was a rush to hear the sky quake.

But the worst disappointment is when the sudden storms fail to break the humidity. It’s similar to stepping inside a subway car expecting sweet relief after you’ve sweated out the entire seven minutes on an overheated platform waiting for the train, only to find it has no air conditioning.

When the dew point does drop, we flock to city parks with our picnic blankets to soak in the sun and feel the breeze kiss our skin. This is summer at its best. These are the days we’ll remember with a slight ache for the memory of warmth when we’re deep in winter.

Summer was never my favorite season until I had kids. It’s still not my favorite if you’re asking, but I’ve come to appreciate it despite, and because of, the way it disrupts routines. But soon—three years to be exact—summer breaks won’t mean much when the youngest is done with college. That will be an adjustment too.

Will the seasons then bleed from one to the next when there is no longer anything to tether time to?

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Related reading

Summer is summering, and an empty New York minute

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Weekly links & recommendations

To read:

• Trust your gut and fail bravely: seven influential women on the advice they would give their 30-year-old selves (The Guardian)
  My advice would be: you should have started investing yesterday.

• A ‘disruption in discovery’: What Google and Instagram’s new search partnership means for brands (Glossy)
  The enshittification of Google search continues. Really do not want search results to look like social feeds.

• Birding is punk (Salon)
  Every morning, we sprinkle bird seed on our balcony for the pair of mourning doves who have lived in our courtyard for generations. Apparently urban bird-watching is cool among the youngsters.

• KNOCK IT OFF! Getting copied is devastating—but not necessarily illegal. Who owns what in an era of unprecedented mass consumption? (The Verge)
  We live in an age of dupes and copy cats and if you’ve ever owned a small business, chances are you’ve been copied too (we have been, relentlessly). Also, had no idea that the “Wirkin,” or the Walmart Birkin, was a thing.

• ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds: AI chatbots may reinforce real-world discrimination (the Next Web)
  It’s still a man’s world no matter what world we live in.

Some interesting art:

• Removed - We all stare at our phones, sure, but what would the scene look like if those devices were removed? A photographic series by artist, Eric Pickersgill.

• Reuben Wu draws aerial geometries with drones and lasers across remote landscapes (Designboom)
  Photographer, Reuben Wu, creates ephemeral light paintings in remote landscapes with lasers attached on drones. Ghostly and ethereal.

To make and eat:

• Spicy, Creamy Weeknight Bolognese (gifted Times Cooking link—hope it works)
  Apparently the most popular recipe in the Times, I tasked one of my kids with this dinner. The addition of red curry had us curious. Maybe not the most obvious dish to eat during a heatwave, but Bolognese reminds us of our trip to Bologna one summer where we happily ate many plates of pasta in the heat.

What else we’re eating this summer:

Left: Naengmyeon. Right: Korean perilla oil noodles

• Cold noodles of any kind: mixed with a sauce of perilla oil, rice vinegar, soy, and perilla leaves (which grows prolifically on our city balcony); enjoyed as naengmyun, chewy buckwheat noodles bathed in a literal icy cold broth—best ordered in Korean restaurants (the ready to eat packages suffices in a pinch, but is never the same), or in the most simplest preparation: mixed with a spoonful of chili crisp.

• Shiso anything. In the perilla family, but more commonly used in Japanese cooking, shiso grows like wild on our balcony as well and we have too much of it. Mark’s substituted shiso in place of perilla for a cold noodle sauce one day and is perfecting a recipe. It’s a surprisingly refreshing alternative. And what does homemade shiso sorbet taste like? Fragrant, but woody like pine, and faintly reminiscent of lychees.