Wishing it was Stifling Hot Outside

Journal of Our Journeys, Chapter 13

Beach Houses and Old Houses

Besides their yearlong residences, one of our relatives in Virginia owned a beach house on the Atlantic Ocean at Virginia Beach, where we stayed for a few days when we visited in 1972.

          All the houses along the beach were on stilts, looking like cartoon-figure ostriches. The beach was many yards from these buildings, so why they had to be up so high was beyond me.

          "The water can indeed reach this high at high tide," I was informed. "And in hurricane season, it can reach even higher."

          Hurricane season! Living in the upper Midwest, we occasionally experience tornadoes. Trees pulled up by the roots, and roofs off of barns blown into the next forty, but these storms rarely made the national news. And no tornado that I know of ever had a name. But a hurricane? That was something that only happened on the evening news with Walter Cronkite.

          There, in Virginia, however, where I only saw ocean waves lapping peacefully at the shore in mid-June warmth, a tropical storm could become a hurricane and wreak havoc on the best-prepared. All the plywood in the world could not save a beach house if Mother Nature meant to have her way with things.

          After allowing us to be awestruck by the beach house, Mom decided we needed to learn a little history.

          Up the Potomac River from Virginia Beach lay the historic site of Jamestown, the first permanent settlement of the white man in the New World. It seemed too primitive to me to be considered anything permanent. And the replicas of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria were surely way too small to have journeyed across the vast Atlantic. How cramped those pioneers had to be! It was impossible to compare these vessels with today's cruise ships.

          Further up the river, historic Williamsburg was a much more refined destination. Many years later, when my son was 14 and returned from a trip there with his class, his first comment was, "You can only see so many old buildings."

          His second comment went something like this: "A couple in authentic period costume was in front of an authentic old building. My buddy was about to take a picture when a minivan drove into view and parked, ruining the whole picture."

          When I visited Williamsburg for the first time in 1972, things were only slightly more authentic because the minivan had not yet been invented.

          Like my son's class, we also visited Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson. I must've secretly shared my son's belief of overdosing on old buildings because, by the time we made it to Monticello, I'd had my fill of historic structures made of red brick.

          A perpetual-type clock over and around the central doorway of Jefferson's home was the only thing that stayed in my mind. The clock was one of his many inventions on display. 

          The stifling hot kitchen was the only other thing that left an impression on my young mind. I cannot imagine the women in their long dresses and petticoats stoking a fire in an eight-foot-square brick room with two tiny windows, while it was 90 degrees outside. Wouldn't it have been easier to open a can of tuna and make sandwiches? That's invention Jefferson should have had in his house.

With the temperature at 27 below outside this morning,
I could stand to be in a stifling hot kitchen. Somebody start a fire! 
This was at Monticello when Hubby and I were there in 2019.