Is the weather hot enough for you?

"Is it hot enough for you?" friends say as they come into the cool house out of the heat.

It is hot, of course, with the thermometer reading well over the 90s and into the 100s. With everyone moaning about the heat, I look back to how it used to be. It was hot then, too, but we learned to live with it.

When we were kids in Trinity County, we generally did our chores in the morning. We spent our afternoons at the river, swimming, playing and sunning ourselves on a sandbar until sundown.

By then, it was time to bring the livestock in and do the milking, so hot days seldom bothered us.

After we grew up, this changed. Now we had to get our work done. The guys sweat so easily that they built in evaporation systems to cool themselves. I didn't sweat much so I had to be careful. When I had to be in the sun or work in the heat, I wore a wet shirt, or carried damp towels.

We came to Redding often and sweltered in the heat. Occasionally we stayed overnight. I remember hotels and motels at various times — the old Temple Hotel, for example. Its brick walls radiated heat all night. A torrid breeze blew a curtain over us, as husband, wife, and toddler, we lay sweating. We took to staying at the Idanha Hotel, a frame building at Pine and Placer, because it felt cooler.

Then signs reading "Air Cooled" began appearing, I remember, specifically, after a sweltering day of shopping and going to the Cascade Theater. Walking into its cool darkness, we enjoyed a movie in cool comfort. We walked out into the street at the end and, Whoa! It felt as though we walked into a solid wall of heat.

It was as though we received a hearty slap from Hades itself when the heat hit us.