Hot weather and rain

Victorian architecture had a solution for hot summer nights

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Weather notes

“In case you haven’t heard, the heat wave here has soared to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for days,” Gina DeVee writes from Paris on her Divine Living Substack. “Even though my apartment (thankfully) has air conditioning, it’s French air conditioning which is the equivalent of a cat breathing on you.”

Much of Western Europe was trapped under an unprecedented heat dome this past week, with record-setting temperatures day after day. Portland suffered a similar phenomenon in 2021, with temperatures hovering above 95 for four straight days and reaching 116 at one point.

France endured a similar hot spell in 2019, with the mercury reaching 104. I remember that because my daughter Maggie was visiting the city with her two small children, who suffered greatly in the heat. Of course, nobody had air-conditioning. It wasn’t needed. Not then.

Summer rain

Meanwhile, in Portland, we’re entering several days of forecasted rain. This is unusual in Oregon, where the summers are typically so dry that unwatered lawns turn brown and you can go camping without a tent.

The lack of rain and humidity in summer sets the Pacific states, California, Oregon and Washington, apart from the East, South and Midwest, where summers are hotter and humidity makes the air sticky, encouraging bugs like mosquitos and gnats.

Air-conditioning is becoming a necessity in western Oregon as the summers become hotter. If it keeps raining, we might have to invest in mosquito netting.

Sleeping porches

One architectural feature that I occasionally see in older houses in my Portland neighborhood is the sleeping porch. These are more common in the Midwest, where I grew up with summers that are hotter and more humid.

The moss on the roof shows that this porch faces north. Fran Gardner photo

The best place for a sleeping porch is on the north side of the house. The room is built out so that there are windows on three sides, increasing cross-drafts. Whole families used to share these quarters on the warmest nights of the summer.

Even though they face north, sleeping porches make great “sunrooms” and studios all year round. Fran Gardner photo

Poem of change

Going, going, going

What’s coming we can’t know and it’s coming so fast— 
All our assumptions, our comfortable tropes
May be so consumed they fuse into glass—
Nothing left, nothing answered, the death of our hopes.

Who can tell, who can tell, the misery coming
A planet so hot that we cannot survive
Who can tell, who can tell how to end all our dreaming
Our art, our striving, what keeps us alive . . .

We’ll have to connect more, understand better
How all is a cycle, an arc of our past.
Oh, woe is us—yes, we are in a pickle.
But maybe, with caring, we can break through the glass.

An artist echoes my work

In its monthly “10-Minute Challenge” series, The New York Times featured a painting by Lois Dodd, who is 99. The painting is of a room in a cottage in Maine, where she goes in summer to escape the heat of her East Village loft in Manhattan.

Farnsworth Museum, Rockport, Maine

I was drawn to “The Painted Room,” featuring a sunny window with yellow curtains and a mysterious backdrop of trees and dark shapes. The New York Times reader is invited to spend 10 minutes simply looking at the painting.

I can tell from this painting and others featured in the article that Dodd and I have the same sort of eye. She sees things—pattern, grids, flat space but mostly light—like I do, and paints them like I take photographs.

“You either enjoy looking at the world or you wander through it without seeing it, which I think a lot of people do,” she said in a story written by Larry Buchanan. “They know enough to look so they don’t break their neck tripping, but otherwise they may not see too much, just enough to be safe.”

Buchanan asked what was catching her eye at that very moment.

“The light on the floor and the window are kind of great right now. It’s what the light does. That’s the most exciting.”

She’s right about that. Art, and photography, aren’t about object or space or perspective. They are about light.

Buchanan asked where she had found the discipline to paint for all those hours, all those days, all those years.

“Oh, that’s not discipline,” she said. “That’s just being alive.”

The same could be said about writing. It’s not discipline. It’s playing.

My own window

Here is a recent photo that I don’t remember taking. I may even have taken it by mistake.

I’m fascinated by the contrasts and the oblique lines and even the scruffy blisters in the black paint. Perhaps this is a reflection in a bus window. I don’t know.

I recognize the frieze from a building at the bus stop at Southwest Sixth and Main in downtown Portland.. I can’t account for the angle. Fran Gardner photo

Another quilt

I’ve just finished a quilt for a friend. The block pattern, Tumbling Stars, is unusual because the stars point to the compass points. I found this pattern in the March 2006 edition of Quilters Newsletter Magazine and knew immediately that I would make my own version of it.

Fran Gardner quilted this.

The woman who created the quilt featured in the magazine, Lorie Stubbs of Lakewood, Colo., pointed out that this block can be happily made up with the ugliest fabric in your stash. I had a lot of fun choosing fabrics I didn’t have any other use for.

I pieced the blocks by hand; that’s the best way to get the corners to align exactly. Lorie provided a unique way of piecing to get the stars pointed in the right direction.

Each block is the same pattern, but the fabric choices make them look different.

This quilt was long-armed by Nancy Stovall of Just Quilting using the Baptist Fan design.

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Writing in color

Substack just added a feature allowing colored type.

Here is a poem written in red.

From red

Red apples, red balloons, the setting sun.
A cardinal, a robin, a duck’s flat foot.
Nature brings us red but not too much.
Leaves eat red light, reflecting in green.

What color am I, beneath and under?
Not what you see, what you know and wonder.
Something rich, purple or chocolate.
Red at the core of me, reflecting the green.

Deep shades of blue, pulsing with color.
Deep shades of green, the nature I see.
Deep shades of red, blossoming outward.
The colors like jewels, the colors of me.

Bowing out for this week

Here’s the weekly reminder to subscribe for free to Becoming if you haven’t already. Maybe upgrade to paid if you haven’t done that yet. Or tip me a few bucks at PayPal. At any rate, keep reading. I love writing, I love having written, and I love being read.

—Fran

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