Missing the swamp fan

Hindsight is 20/20, and nothing could be a truer truism for that moment in the foreign service when you finally get all your stuff and start cursing for having given this or that away, or sent this or that box to storage. The cursing is not all self-directed, as there are often plenty of other people to blame along the way too, like those in charge of pulling or placing all this stuff in and out of storage somewhere in Maryland. I've gotten over the fact that we did not get our Christmas ornaments but did get somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hundred pounds of docs, pics, and the minutiae of the past that we really didn't want to see for a decade or so. Recently, I've been doing some belated mental self-flagellation for not having held on to a certain appliance that was indispensable at the height of the Ellensburg summer: the swamp fan. I have to admit, purchasing it was a serious leap of faith for a midwesterner who had never really cared for the humidity of southwestern Michigan as a child and spent most of my grad school summers in Pittsburgh holed up in the library, an air-conditioned cafe or office, or in my bedroom with the window unit cranking. The idea of simply blowing water into the air seemed pretty crazy, but lo and behold, it worked. And get this--I was at the fancy mall the other day, and they've essentially installed the equivalent of a grocery store produce section mister system for people. You walk under these little metal hoops and they squirt a fine mist out from time to time, which is refreshing but pretty short-lived in terms of providing relief, unless you plan to just stand under the jets. The heat index also explains why the mall that was formerly the nicest one in town still does at least a brisk pedestrian business, as it has central air. The heat is not unbearable, but it is enough to make people jockey over shaded parking spaces and hot enough to keep the kids inside most afternoons and hot enough to require some serious watering to keep the garden from turning to dust in the matter of a day or two. The one rainfall we had, heavy enough to fill our lidless recycling can with a good six inches of water, made me feel like the bubble boy the next day for what it did for the air quality. So while I'm not complaining (we have friends in Oman who are helping me keep a little perspective on the matter), I do kind of wish I hadn't ditched the swamp fan.