A 6-shower day

It's just as they told me when I got here in November.  Semana Santa is the hottest time of the year.  Yesterday I took four official showers in my room and one with the hose when I was watering seedlings and one at the lavandero when I was washing my clothes.  It's a strange heat.  It's not as hot as it gets in California, but it is an all-consuming heat that seems to cause everything to be the same temperature.  There are no 'cool' spots.  The rancho is the most comfortable place to be because it always seems to have a breeze flowing through it.  But when the wind stops I realize that the heat is always there.  It's not a heat that hits you in the face when you step outside.  It's a slow, building warmth that starts from the inside out.  This land never really experiences cold weather so the soil really never cools off.  Consequently, it acts like a brick in a warm oven that slowly releases the day's heat of the sun in a cycle that has probably gone on since the last ice age.
A couple of nights ago the unthinkable happened.  The electricity went out.  My fan stopped.  Again, the air wasn't hot, or even warm.  But slowly, surely I began to warm.  The collected heat of thousands of years of warm days, one after another, began to build and permeate every object, including me.  Soon my body was covered in a thin layer of sweat.  I left my door unopened to hopefully alleviate the stuffiness, the phantom heat. It helped a little, but I got very little sleep that night. Next time I'm going to hang in a hammock in the rancho--hopefully that night will never come.