Fresh

(Sweet corn from Hilgert’s Farm. July 2006. Click on photo for larger version.)

This week’s Photo Friday theme is Fresh. Yes, I’m aware it’s not Friday. I’m getting caught up. The one I did this past Friday was actually last week’s theme.

Our new apartment, like any apartment, has its pros and cons. One of the cons is that it’s cold. Freezing cold on some nights. We have three little electric baseboard heaters — one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and one in the bedroom. There’s no heat at all in the bathroom.

Being a woman of a certain age, I can usually generate my own heat. Some people call them Power Surges, but they’re more commonly known as Hot Flashes. It’s not entirely an age thing as I’ve always been somewhat hot blooded, enjoying the cold weather much more than I do hot weather. When it’s cold you can add layers to get warm, but you can only strip so far when you’re hot. And if you’re naked and still hot, well, there’s nowhere else to go with the stripping.

Heat, ma’am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones. ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir

Anyhow, here we are in this quaint little college town freezing our arses off due to the fact that we weren’t prepared for the lack of heat. We didn’t bring enough blankets, for one thing. I frequently have trouble sleeping (due to pain) and will usually move out to the sofa to sleep (or toss and turn), but I’m unable to do that here because we have no extra blankets. Being thrifty folks who don’t want to have to pay an outrageous electric bill or further contribute to global warming, we try to keep the heat at a low setting.

This has not been fun, especially when the temperature fell to about 18 degrees (f) and it seemed as though it wasn’t much warmer than that in the apartment.

So, in case you’re wondering about the sweet corn, I picked out that photo because it’s one of the highlights of summer. Fresh, sweet corn. Just picked sweet corn. It is, I think, a symbol of hot summer days and melting ice cream nights. I wanted, for just a moment, to feel the warmth and freshness of summer and sweet corn is It. The epitome. Biting into a freshly picked ear of sweet corn is a little taste of sunlight and earth, growth and harvest. It is, I believe, as fresh as you can get.

Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn. ~Garrison Keillor