07/17/10 - Last summer it rained. The winter came early and lasted long, the spring was a great flood that put the entire state in a federally declared disaster zone. Daffodils, denied warmth, bloomed late, shad, stirred to life by heavy rains, flowered early.

Late May and early June boded well for the coming season, filled with beautiful days, long and golden, the ones that make the worst of the winter, the darkest, deepest, most wind ravaged, a distant memory. The price, I say, that we pay for endless evenings and early mornings.

Then the heat came.

Last year the Fourth of July was not hot, it was delightful, the first — and last — glimmer of hope for the summer. There were good days here and there, maybe even a good week, but in my mind it was one long rain.

This year the Fourth was, as it often is, hot. This year the holiday heat did not pass, but settled into a pattern of forecasts calling for extreme temperatures that would break in a day or two. Always a day or two away, elusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Grass dried to brown in early July, too sear too soon. We fell into a pattern of showers and I remembered someone talking about Panama where it rained every afternoon, cutting the heat of the day. Here, it seemed, again, hopeful, the pavement steaming, cooling, the thirsty earth finding some relief. Sunbeams were caught and tuned to bands of color, always the same, bowing across the sky.

Steaming pavement does not provide the longed for respite, it merely leaves the air steamy. Stepping into air-conditioning at first feels heavenly but a few hours spent going in and out makes it feels so much worse stepping back into the swamp air. Everyone talks of thunder and lightning clearing the air but the storms on the radar dissipate before they hit us, the thunder in the sky fades after a few tentative rumbles. I carry an umbrella, feeling smug when the sun disappears and the rain spatters on the walk outside; it has stopped by the time I am leaving the building, stepping, again, into the heavy laden air.

Here, down the Mansion Road, the breeze blew across a tree shaded yard but only a few miles away, in our very little town, the difference was marked. These days always make me wonder how the great cities in temperate climates ever came to be, how New York and London grew and thrived long before air conditioning became a part of building design, and access to grass and water was not a privilege granted everyone.

I think of the photographs of visitors from over 100 years ago, ladies in long dresses, not the airy garments we wear today but heavy, multilayer rigs, and gentlemen in high collars and jackets. Visitors from an era when a Providence tailor found a summer’s trade pressing the clothes of people staying in the hotels.

The verandas were long, open to the sea breezes in most of the advertisements, but the rooms were generally small. Transoms over doors were louvered, letting some air pass, before fire codes were in place, and for all the boasts of hot and cold running water, even of running sea water in some establishments, it was usually down the hall.

The beach was crowded in the old photos, covered with people in many layers of bathing costumes that are comical today. One postcard shows a line waiting to rent what someone else had worn yesterday. Somewhere I have a bottle of hand sanitizer I bought and put on a shelf, some shelf, somewhere. I have virtually no concern over the spreading of germs that seems to traumatize part of the population but even I wonder how anyone could don a rig, likely still damp, worn a day before by someone, anyone, else. It is on my increasing long list of things not to romanticize about the good old days.

Tonight, finally, the wind has shifted into the east, damp but cool rolling up from the water that beach goers have been telling me is almost warm which makes me think of hurricane. There is only one day of sun forecast among the next several but we have been getting an hour of rain when a whole afternoon has been predicted, has appeared approaching on the radar in the morning.

There isn’t a great deal of traffic on Beach Avenue toward the end of the day. There is no one anywhere behind me and, without causing incident, I can slow to a stop to watch the tall white egret in the Harbor Pond, the old Crescent Lake. The tide is low, the current nearly stilled as he moves with graceful, tentative steps. The water is a mirror; he has become two birds out there, one walking on the reflection of the sky.

The water is still I realize because the tide is so low that an egret can walk across the pond. There are no boats in such shallows, no kids tempting fate leaping from the bridge, which always make me shudder and wonder when we turned into Tallahatchie.

The egret reminds me of another sighting, off Corn Neck Road. The rocks off the beach where the road runs so close are many but all but one disappear with each high tide. One day before this heat that belongs in early August arrived there was an egret on that ocean, standing on a rock that was submerged under the shallowest skim of water. Perhaps it was the same one, having realized that even tall elegant white birds sometimes need a trick or two. That day he looked to be standing on the ocean, not the sky, the current moving about his feet rather than his feet moving through it.

People were standing along the road but they were all looking in the wrong direction. The light was good, the beach in the shifting light of day’s end beautiful but hardly, in my mind, on par with an egret on the ocean.