I’ve been up for 2.5 hours. Why? Seems some dudes decided to have a drunken party at 5am in our parking lot or perhaps just beyond on the grassy slope that contains picnic tables…Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly where the sounds are coming from because the rear of my building is u-shaped and sounds just echo around it.

With windows closed and the noisy a/c I shouldn’t have heard the noise but I have my husband trained to check the weather when he gets up at approximately 4:30am. He had shut off the a/c and opened the windows. I usually can sleep through the bird racket but drunken singing in several languages, shouts of “oompah” and general raucousness – this I can not sleep through.

We are headed into our 17th consecutive day of over 90 degree days. We need to beat the previous record of 21 days – I think we’ll make that and exceed it (according to the weather forecasts.) Along with the heat we have high to very high humidity. But sometimes, just sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning, the humidity and temps moderate themselves to a comfortable degree and I can open the windows until about 9am.

As soon as those windows open I fall into a deep and wonderful sleep. No noisy a/c, no chilled to the bone by that a/c. There is really no way to moderate it, either it’s on and freezing or off and stuffy and hot. My husband thinks we might need new thermostats, I think we need to move, either to a newer building with better mechanics or another state, or hell, for other reasons, another country. I would be so happy to move to another country – any country where they speak English – at my age learning a new language is just not in the cards.

I have said before that I don’t belong anywhere – wherever I am, that’s where I belong until I move on to another place. I have no loyalty to place or country. I have no roots, no attachments to places or things. Yes, I will always be “the little Italian girl from the Bronx” and New York City will always be me, bred in the bone, but I have to say, I would NEVER live in NYC again even if you paid me (and you would have to because I can’t afford to live there.)

We have lived here, in this particular place, for 8 years now, and that is the longest I’ve lived anywhere in the last 31 years – so past the time to move on – to anywhere – even just a mile down the road to a more convenient location. In my daydreams I move much farther – across the country or across the border or across the ocean – Atlantic, Pacific, either one, I’m not fussy.

I have no present, I do have a past and for some strange reason, I think I still have a future. I’ll be 74 this year – future is not really a viable construct. And yet, that is where I live – in my mind, in the future. Oh, the places I will go!