We’d been inside almost all day, with windows and doors and shutters closed. In a desperate attempt to cool down our little house, I put a frozen bottle of water in front of the fan. ‘Did you forget this one?’, my girlfriend texted me when I was away for a while. She sent a picture of the fan with the water.
‘No’, I replied, ‘this is our air conditioner.’
We didn’t go out until after dinner. It was like opening the door of an oven. The heat was crushing and gave the world an unreal weight. From the back seat of the car, my one daughter said she felt like a “marshmallow in the fire.” The other thought he was ‘a melting ice cream cone’.
The beach hardly provided any cooling. The east wind was like a hair dryer, bringing with it the dry smell of the dunes. The Atlantic Ocean was the only way out. I took my oldest daughter into the water and threw her up with every wave. Some were so high that we both went under. I kept lifting her until my arms ached and my ears were full of water. As we walked out of the sea I looked at the surfers and told her I should have brought my board too. “But then you couldn’t have played with me.”
Suddenly, as if by magic, the wind turned. From one second to the next it became five, maybe ten degrees cooler. It was spectacular. An inaudible collective sigh of relief swept the beach. The veil had been lifted from the world and suddenly she was back to the way it should be.
Now the wind smelled of the sea, of the coming clear and cool night. In addition to the heat, the wind also took with it this evening. An evening that I was going to feel homesick for, that much was already clear to me at that moment. To my daughter, who made cartwheels in the hard sand. To the sound of the waves. To the soft light and the relief that the turning of the wind had brought me.
When the cartwheels were over, we exchanged the beach for a terrace. My girlfriend and I drank cold sweet cider while our daughters ate a Frozen ice cream; a purple cone with a thin chocolate rim and a twig of chemical light blue ice cream made from Elsa’s tears. Everyone was silent and the late sunlight fell on the branches of a pine tree across the road. I asked my friend if she knew what kind of tree it was. Because I wanted to write this down.