Summer Nights

I was sitting on the newly arranged love seat sipping my morning coffee staring out the picture window at the pouring rain.  The wind is gusting to 80 kms and Brandy can't go outside without becoming a wet soggy dog.  Even though today will only hit a high of 17*C, it made me remember.....

I was about 10 or 11, maybe even 12, and it was a hot hot evening in my parents house.  They didn't have air conditioning then and wouldn't until I was closer to 15.  It was the kind of sticky humid heat that made you uncomfortable to be inside and outside.  Mom and Dad had some kind of fan that often sat in the doorway of the front door.  You had to put water in it.  I don't know if it worked but I know that summer it got a good work out.

We had been somewhere, I don't recall where.  Maybe at my grandparents or just out for a drive as we often did that when I was a kid.....just to find relief sometimes.  It was about 11pm.  My parents had opened all the windows in the house and were sitting out on the front step because it had finally cooled down outside or at least it was cooler than being inside.

Magnum PI was on the TV.

.....and I was torn.  I wanted to watch TV but it was hot.  From inside the living room I could hear the murmur of my parents conversation  on the front step.  They encouraged me to go outside and I did go in and out a few times.  Mom thought Tom Selleck looked pretty good with that mustache and I always secretly thought maybe that's why Dad had a 'stache too.

On a night like that we sure would have appreciated rain like we're getting today.

It was also on a hot evening like that I'd see my grandparents car pull up outside.  They drove a '77 Grand Prix which would later become mine on my 16th birthday.  We'd all pile into the luxury sports car and head to Dairy Queen.  Mom, Grandma D and I would wait in the car.  I'd always get a hot fudge sundae while Grandma would get strawberry.   Thinking about it now and I can almost smell that new-car-grandparent smell.

My own parents are older now than my grandparents were then.

Such great memories from a rainy late summer day.