I went out Sunday at 6:14 AM to water the dahlias barefoot, the way Travis hates because of the copperheads, and the second I stepped off the porch I got hit in the face with a smell I have not smelled since the 2003 Myrtle Beach trip with my cousins. Sweet. Chemical. Coconut, but the kind of coconut that has never seen a coconut. The exact bouquet of the spray-on Banana Boat they keep on the bottom shelf at the CVS by the airport. I looked up and the sky had a film on it. Not a haze. A film. There is a difference and your body knows.
I texted Marisol from Appalachian Mothers Against the Atmospheric Film (3,400 members, all verified by photo of their pantry), and within nine minutes I had three independent confirmations from women between here and Weaverville. Patrice’s labradoodle would not leave the mudroom. A woman in Black Mountain said her rain barrel had a sheen on it. We are not making this up across forty miles of mountain at the same hour for fun.
My sister-in-law Renee, who does intake at a chiropractic and wellness practice and has therefore absorbed roughly a dozen radiology rotations by sheer professional osmosis, explained it to me on speaker while she folded laundry. When a heat dome sets up, she said, it is not coming down — it is pulling up. Up off the asphalt, up off the cul-de-sacs, up off every can of aerosolized Coppertone sprayed onto a child’s shoulders since 1987. The smell, Renee said, is not the dome itself. The smell is what is holding it down. I had to sit on the porch step for a minute.
We will not be running the AC. AC pulls outdoor air into the envelope of the home faster than passive ventilation (Cody, our HVAC neighbor, confirmed this in a way he probably did not mean to), so I have shut every window and hung two wet wool blankets from the upstairs banister, which is an old Slovak grandmother technique I learned about on a Telegram channel a friend of a friend keeps forwarding me screenshots from. The wool catches what the linen misses. You have to wring it out into the yard, not the sink, but that’s a separate post.
Travis thinks I am being, in his words, “a lot this week.” He said this while drinking sixteen ounces of unfiltered municipal tap water from a Yeti, out of a system that openly fluoridates, so I am not currently weighting his cosmology very heavily. He also wore a poly-blend shirt to Lowe’s yesterday, which, in a heat dome, is essentially walking around with a small antenna. I love him. I have told him.
The children smell it too, which is the part nobody can argue with me about. Ember walked outside, sniffed once, and asked if someone had “spilled the beach.” Wren, who is six and has a nose like a bloodhound and has never been wrong about a smell in her life, said it smelled like “the inside of Aunt Renee’s car,” which, I am sorry to report, is correct. Children are uncalibrated instruments. They cannot lie about smells. This is established.
Here is what you do this week. Open one window on the north side of your house at 5:47 AM — lowest particulate hour, per the running spreadsheet the Weatherwise Mothers group keeps and updates by region — and close it again before the school buses run, because diesel rises into the dome and gets pinned there like a lid. Do not let your kids play on hot blacktop; the dome settles into asphalt first, which is why parking lots feel “meaner” in summer than they used to. Wear linen. Wear hemp. If you only have synthetics, at minimum take the tags off, because the metallic threads in clothing tags are tiny and absolutely doing something.
Salt, by the way, helps. I have been putting a pinch of Redmond Real Salt into every glass of water in the house, including the dog’s. Salt is a mineral, and minerals are not additives, they are the earth, and the earth is the thing we are currently being protected from above by a film, so it tracks. Renee agreed and she would know.
If you go outside this week and smell coconut and the back end of a CVS at the same time, I need you to text three people. Not post. Text. That is how a perimeter forms. The dome cannot hold over a county where the mothers have already confirmed the smell to one another by name. I genuinely believe this and I have four children and a notebook to prove it.