A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Byline: CAROL BIDWELL

IT'S hot, humid days like the ones we had recently that make me feel like a kid again, growing up in rural Missouri, where the temperature in the summer hovered around 100 degrees every day, with 100 percent humidity.

"It's not the heat, it's the humidity," the adults used to say, discussing the weather while mopping the backs of their necks with the big, white handkerchiefs that everybody used to carry back more than a half-century ago.

No, they were wrong. It was the heat and the humidity, working together to make it feel like you were trying to breathe air the consistency of maple syrup. That made you feel as if you needed a shower the minute you toweled off after a shower. That made even playing outside in the shade of the apple tree impossible, and reading a book while sitting in the porch swing the most taxing thing a kid wanted to do.

In the 1950s in the Midwest, there was virtually no air conditioning. The only cool place in town was the movie theater, whose management capitalized on that by hanging a big banner -- "Air Cooled Inside," with little icicles for effect -- across the marquee. Tickets sold like popsicles on the Fourth of July. People went to see movies just so they could spend the length of two features, a cartoon and maybe a newsreel in the cool, dark comfort of the theater.

They knew that once they got home, it would be too hot to go to bed. So they savored that cool air until the movie projector was shut down for the night.

In those postwar days, few families even owned a fan, so there was no way to sleep in your bed on those hot, sticky nights. The day's heat would hang around until the early morning. The sheets would close in on you and would soon be soaked with sweat. So my mom would spread cotton quilts on the living room floor, and that's where we'd all sleep -- with the front and back doors open, hopefully to catch what little breeze might waft through.

It was invariably during the hottest week of August that my mother decided I needed a winter coat. I remember, seemingly every summer, sniveling and whining as we stood in some uncooled downtown Kansas City department store, both of us sweating bullets, as she stuffed me into the thickest, heaviest wool coat she could find, warning me not to grow any bigger before winter hit.

But summer was not all bad, despite the heat. That heat and sunshine, in fact, was what made my father's one-acre garden grow. In the spring, he tilled the soil and planted seeds and carried water until the corn and the beans climbed tall and the beefsteak tomatoes grew to the size of a salad plate.

"We need tomatoes for supper," my mother would say, and my father would take my hand and the salt shaker and we'd head for the garden. He'd whip out his pocket knife and carve open a giant red beefsteak. We'd eat it standing right there, the juice dripping down our chins. Once in awhile, we'd forget why we were there and go back to the house empty-handed, and my mother would have to send us out again.

During those hot August days, my mother would can what my father had grown. Those canned vegetables would see us through the winter, along with apples and cherries from the trees in the yard.

And there were summer peaches -- big, fuzzy ones, the size of a softball -- from a neighbor down the street who had a peach tree. Every Sunday, after church and midday dinner, Daddy would load the ice-cream maker with rock salt and ice, Mom would mix up cream, sugar and peaches, and we'd sit under the apple tree that gave the most shade. Daddy would crank and crank. In an hour or so, we'd have peach ice cream so achingly sweet and fresh your tongue would do a little happy dance in your mouth.

Then as darkness fell, we'd move to the porch and listen to the radio, which could whisk us away to wonderful places as we sat watching the flashes from the heat lightning and the lightning bugs.

I'd almost trade my air-conditioned car and my freezer for just one more of those lazy, sticky days. Or maybe not.