Excellent advice from my mother

So I guess it's going to summer now, huh? Muggy and stifling, with nightly thunderstorms that knock the power out just long enough so that you have to reset 12 clocks or face perpetual blinking midnight everywhere you turn.

Are you hot yet? We turned the air conditioner on for the first time since mid-June yesterday. With a click and whirr it softly brought itself to life and just like that soothing little puffs out cool air started billowing around our overheated rooms.

I came to air conditioning fairly late, with my parents installing the central air unit when I was halfway through high school, so most of my memories of summer interiors involve closely drawn shades and the ritual opening and shutting of windows, ceiling fans, and popsicles. So I am always vaguely in awe that I can command the cold with some fairly minor pressing of buttons on my own thermostat.

Our air conditioner is new, and it's the first 'climatised air' I've lived with since I left home for university. And because of my strong preference for loads of natural light and a monastic noise level, I have tended, over the decade of my single, apartment-dwelling life, to choose south-facing apartments near the tops of buildings. This has meant that my summers have always been very, very warm.

In Edmonton, near the end of my PhD, we suffered a real scorcher of a summer and my apartment at the time was a glorified bachelor with both eastern and southern exposure, at the very top of a red brick building with flat tar roof. Basically, if you imagine my apartment as a cube (four walls and a floor and a roof) three of the six sides were exposed to 15 hours of unremitting sun. It was like living in a pizza oven. My thermostat was one of those vertical-slider types to set the heat level, but a circular mechanism to mark the temparature on that vertical axis, and it got so hot in the apartment that the temperature needle spun right off the top of the scale and disappeared back into the mechanism.

I took a polaroid, which scorched in the heat, and distorted beyond recognition.

I was dying from the heat, listless and doing not much besides drink fizzy water with a splash of lime. I called my mom. She cut my rambling complaints short and gave me the best, craziest piece of advice that I'm now going to share with you.

"Put your bathing suit on and have a shower," she told me.

"Um, I'm quite comfortable showering naked, actually."

"No, Mimi, the point is to damp-dry yourself when you come out, and keep the bathing suit on."

"???"

"Think: have you ever in your life been too hot while wearing a wet bathing suit?"

No, actually, no I haven't. And I bet you haven't either. Take a moment. Cast back in your mind. Getting anything? Too hot in a bathing suit, yes, but in a wet bathing suit? No.

So I did it. You can't really sit on the upholstered furniture, but you can wash dishes, make the bed, tidy up, run the vacuum, sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper, dye your hair. And you won't be too hot.

Moms. Sometimes, their advice is excellent, if unorthodox.