Peace and Quiet

The four day heat wave has finally come to an end.  Of course there was the usual misery of my body not doing well with the heat and humidity.  It didn't matter what the room temperature was I was too hot.  I was amazingly irritated and grumpy.  I have spent the better part of the last four days confined to two rooms of my house.   This is worse than winter when I at least can roam the entire first floor of the house.  Now I had the bedroom or the living room to choose from.  If I braved the heat I could get on the internet for a few minutes in the office before having to retreat into the other two rooms.

My husband knew the heat bothered me a lot so he went out and bought me an extra air conditioner for the living room.  One of those portable floor models.  Because we don't have double hung windows I was forced to pump the hot air out into the kitchen, which made that room even more unbearable than it already was.  The back of the house has skylights which turns it into a Suzybake oven on sunny days and now I was pumping waste heat in there as well.  Can you say BBQ four days in a row!?!

Anyway, I knew from last summer that the heat bothered me.  I was expecting the hot flashes and severe sweating that I had last summer.  Heck it was so bad I had to wear thick cotton socks around so that I didn't leave wet footprints on the floor.  Not this year.  What bothered me was the noise.  The relentless unremitting whining grinding sound of air conditioners running 24 hours a day.  The noise got to me.

I've spent the last year in quiet.  I live in a quiet neighborhood.  I generally don't listen to music.  I talk with my friend via the internet rather than by phone.  I only have the TV on so many hours of the day and my family isn't around much so I spent most of my waking hours in the quiet with only my cats annoying me when they want food or decide they have tales to tell me.  By the third day, I was ready to rip someone's head off.  Everything was grating on my nerves.  It was like someone giving me an Indian sunburn that wouldn't stop.  On the third day I ended up in bed with ear plugs in and two pillows over my head so that I could have some relative quiet.  It still annoyed me that I could still faintly hear the AC grinding away.   Plus my head was hot under the pillows.  GRRRR!!!

Finally last night my husband drove me north to NH to Hampton Beach.  A place that is noisy itself but it was ten degrees cooler up there so we  turned off the AC, rolled the windows down and cruised through the strip up to the north side to one of the smaller beaches.  Hubby found a parking space close enough to the water that I got out of the truck and walked down into the surf.  The frosty.  Cold.  Icy surf.  OMG, the Atlantic is so cold up north.  I have no idea how the kids swim in this stuff.  But it felt delicious.  I was standing in the roaring rolling icy surf in my bare feet.  The water washing over my toes and pulling the sand out from behind my heels.  Standing in the surf gives you a weird vertigo even when you are well and I found it even more disorientating with CFS.  But what the heck if I fall I'll just be soggy for the ride home.  Won't be the first time I've fallen fully dressed into the surf and ridden home in my underwear ;-)

So there I stood in the encroaching dusk, kids playing hundreds of yards away, with freezing cold toes and the surf washing away all that horrible nasty tense AC irritation that had been building up in me for four days.  It was delicious!!!!  It was delightful!!  I was finally relaxed and dare I say happy.  It didn't take long before I had to sit down.  My husband went for a long walk down the shoreline while I sat in the dry sand swatting at various bugs that decided I would make a nice snack.  I truly wished that I could have sat quietly, letting my body relax further, closing my eyes and only listening to the waves washing in and out, but the darn bugs wouldn't let me.  When a black fly came after me, I was forced to move again so I went back into the surf.  I walked along the beach with the water lapping over my feet.  Icy cold and glorious.  I felt normal.  I felt normal for the first time in months.  I was walking.  I was strolling along the beach barefoot in the water.  Bliss!!

Next time I go I'm taking an old aluminum style beach chair so I can sit in the surf with my feet getting wet.  That would make me very very happy.