Sweet Talcum

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcum.   from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee  

Days and days of 100+ degree weather is wilting the peppers and tomatoes in the garden and has made the yard nothing but a patch of dry, crunching fiber.  It wilts me too.  The heat is invasive even when I stay inside where the air conditioner moderates the temperature.  Somehow, the heat glazes the windows and pokes fingers of blasted air around the doors defying the cool inside.

I try to work in the garden early in the morning when it is relatively cool.  By nine or ten o'clock the heat begins to bake everything.  I head for the shower drenched is sweat and ready to feel the cool water.  When your head is baked by the sun and you've worked outside until the sweat runs down your back and arms, there is nothing like standing under the cool stream of water in the shower.  But the best part of a summer shower is the talcum.  I might be one of the last people in the world to use talcum;  that soft powder on freshly dried skin is a silken coating that defies the heat.  Pampered by its slippery smoothness on my parched skin, I think of the ladies of old.  Talcum and a cool bath was all the relief they had in the heat of summer.  My grandmother used to use big fluffy pad to apply the loose powder to her skin.  I remember watching her standing in her slip on a hot day in a cloud of sweet talcum as she moved the puff over arms and neck.  My talcum comes in a shaker bottle, but I think back to those wise women who knew how to fight the sticky summer heat and follow their lead  with a dousing of sweet talcum on a hot summer day.