Whenever it gets this hot I wish I could reenact that scene from Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover, wherein the mother goes on a water-wash cleaning binge in their house in 1929 French colonial Vietnam. Duras writes how the house was raised above the Mekong, so it "can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen...[we] splash each other, then wash the floor with yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot...[the] whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight...."
Pictured: Waterfall, Blue Brook -- John Henry Twachtman, ca. 1895 (Cincinnati Art Museum)
Pictured: Waterfall, Blue Brook -- John Henry Twachtman, ca. 1895 (Cincinnati Art Museum)
