Cribbed from a letter to DWS

It's most terribly hot here, about 108 degrees yesterday (no, I don't know what that is in celsius even though my mother asks me incessantly, God knows when she so fully embraced the metric system) and so we've taken to lying as close to the pool as possible under big shady umbrellas and literally rolling ourselves into the cool water as it becomes unbearable. Heat, like pain and war, is unavoidable. There is no getting around it. One can only work with what one has, like the war, making clothes out of old curtains, and pouring cool glasses of iced tea and lemonade that clink optimistically with ice, and rolling into the pool like blubbery sea lions from our manmade rocks into the cool blue yonder.