Welcome!
After a well-deserved 5-year rest from writing I have returned, electronically. This blog will be updated each day. Occasionally I will publish clips from my past printed material, because it still makes me laugh. Anyone who blogs will agree that the greatest reward is in the creation of enjoyable content. Bernadette Wickersham

 Bernadette's Back!

July 6, 2012
Heat Getting To Ya?

When I’m sitting in my shorts on my vinyl office chair, and I jump up quickly, it makes a sound like a hundred velco strips being ripped apart, and it produces terrible pain, and it means I have left my thigh skin on the chair seat. That tells me it is hot. 

When I was a child, there were no air-conditioners in homes or in our cars. All the cars were black, designed to absorb heat, and were furnished with mohair seats. Mohair is, of course, made from the hair of the Angora goat, who was happy to donate it for car seats because it is so hot and prickly. So when the heat became unbearable in our black cars, we rolled down the windows, red-faced and panting and gazed enviously at the naked angora goats frolicking happily in the fields.

Neither did we have air-conditioning in school.  We wore woolen uniforms, and the girls wore skirts, so as we sat at our desks on the wooden seat, we steam-ironed a permanent pattern of our uniform pleats on the backs of our legs. On hot days there was always an odor of damp wool and wet wood, but in my twelve school years without school air conditioning, I don’t remember one student (or teacher) who suffered from heat exhaustion. We did have a teacher collapse one day in the seventh grade, but  she  passed out from the cloud of teenage body odor in the classroom.

See you tomorrow!