Hot, Hot Austin

Arguably, moving to a new town in time for its biggest heat wave since 1860 is not the best way to settle in to a new place. Especially when the kind of record temperatures we are talking about are the kind with three digits. Even more so if one is conducting this move with a nine-year-old Californian who is accustomed to playing outside every day for hours on end. And playing, mind you, with humans her own size and age, not, as it were, with mosquitoes, and multitudes of them at that, to which she is dreadfully allergic. Which is all to say that our first few weeks, make that months, of life in Austin were difficult, which is why I had to wait six months to even begin to write about them.

It is not that we are California softies unaccustomed to heat. We are California softies with relatives in India who we visit often and almost always in the summer, so we *know* what heat is. Painfully so. Trust me. But that is another story for another blog (a book perchance?). I jokingly called Austin "Delhi with A/C." That was right up until the night, about two weeks in, when the power went out. Power outages are endemic to Delhi; I recall one hot day in particular, when the still fans were taunting my very sanity, as they were too often wont to do, having a conversation with my father-in-law in which I informed him, with a haughty tilt of my head, that power outages are very rare in the States. (And then that summer we had rolling blackouts in California, which no one but the two of us recognized as God paying me back for my bad manners.) But power outages were not what I expected in Austin. We sat in our family room for hours, feeling the cool air slowly seep out of the house as the vicious hot air forced its way inside. Don't ask me why we didn't simply pack up and head out to a restaurant or a mall. Maybe we didn't really know where to go yet in our new town. But more likely we simply fashioned ourselves martyrs, or possibly morons - it never occurred to us to escape. We sat there and took it, watching the clock tick the minutes off to the time when the woman on the phone had informed my husband Sushil that the power would be restored. Austin has some number you just call to find out these matters. I didn't believe her, but sitting there getting hotter and hotter, and naturally more and more irritable, I needed to believe her, desperately. I was, therefore, livid when the appointed time came and went. Then, ten minutes past, the lights came on and the A/C kicked in. I sat on the couch, rejoicing at the sound of the refrigerator back to its important work of keeping the beer cold, and marveling at the psychic powers of the woman on the phone. For weeks afterward, I was wary that another outage was right around the corner, that Austin was simply Delhi after all. Thankfully, that was the only one. The A/C kept working right up until the day we switched it over to heat, fairly certain that the temperature had dropped some forty or fifty degrees in the span of 24 hours.

How does one entertain a child who cannot function in heat in the middle of summer? How does one go about enjoying the wide front porch of one's home-owning dreams when mosquitoes come in large family groups to feast on one's ripe, untouched California skin? We had changed our license plates over to Texas ones just as fast as we could so that the local folks would more readily accept us as their own, but the flying bloodsuckers of our yard knew better: this was virgin territory and they alighted with ferocity. There was only one answer to our dilemma: the local swimming pool. The pool is but a handful of blocks away, but might I remind you of the triple-digit heat, so that you and Al Gore might together forgive us for the regrettable sin of actually driving that distance each afternoon, where we spent a couple of hours playing and trying to be nice, well-mannered people again, the kind who know that heat and mosquitoes can only last so long and that better days must surely be ahead.