Salt of the Earth

I started out this summer with the familiar god-it's-scorching trip until one afternoon. The house I share with a friend needed turning over so we wouldn't start a plague and the plants seemed resigned to their waterless fate. So it began, with the spoilt money plant, dripping the water carefully down the climber support in the middle. Seeping up and down the fibres until the plant seemed to shine in places. The plants drank hungrily, the dry earth exploded in little brown bubbles, sending a resentful mud-smell all over the place.
Then came the scrubbing and the floors seemed to give out a kind of marble-heat that I could almost feel creeping up. Where I leant, the skin seemed to stick to the wall, the back had to be peeled off. Where I bent, the sweat slithered in my knee joints, armpits, elbows, smoothing the edges of my movement. All this while my head swirled in the heat, caught in the monotonous action of hands and feet working across the floor.
Before I knew it, I was dripping in sweat. I could feel the shine of my back, the little rivulets running down my hips, the moist palm and instep, the glistening scalp and hair coming to knots and sticking to my nape. The sweat pouring down my face. The salt I could feel catching even my eyelashes.
I am a winter person but this was life teeming like my body was the primeval soup or something. It somehow reminded me of earthworms turning the moist, warm earth, their slippery dirty-red bodies moving like liquid caught in membranes. It reminded me of green leaves catching the sun on their faces, almost baking to a resolute dark green. It reminded me of the ivory-white roots of the drumstick tree that my grandmother dug up every now and then, giving off the smell of the earth and sun and decay.

Post-script: My day ended predictably, in office, in air-conditioning that brought gentle wafts of a hundred kinds of deodrant every now and then. Air-conditioning that sucked the moisture out and rendered a sanitised, cut-and-dried version. It was heaven, as a colleague put it. Antiseptic heaven, I suppose.