Chiara visits Charleston, SC

The forecast for Charleston, SC, is scattered thunderstorms into the indefinite future. They greeted me on arrival yesterday and appeared during today's lunch at a delightful bistro with the best fish and chips I've ever eaten. If one were to assume that the storms blow away the 100% humidity, one would be quite, quite wrong. It's oppressive and makes breathing difficult; AC is not a choice here the way it sometimes seems so at home. Apparently it can be gotten used to, but that probably takes more than 24 hours.

I'm staying with 6 friends - 2 adults, their son and daughter, and 2 cats out of a novel. Oscar is neurotic and takes adult Prozac, designated by CVS as "canine" (yes I know cats are felines). As my friend tells it, Oscar's life took a turn for the worse when their first child was born, and when they had a second and moved from Cville to Charleston, he completely lost it. Each time he enters the house, he takes an interminable amount of time and engages in nighttime rituals, alternating meowing to go out with meowing to come in. He and Sebastian, who lost one-third of his tail in a past life, follow like dogs when the family takes walks.

Other than being humid, Charleston is beautiful. Like Rome, Charleston has strict laws about the appearance of buildings, requiring city approval to change the color of one's home, if one happens to be rich enough to live downtown. Walking by Rainbow Row, near the Battery, I learned about the classic Charleston sideways porch.


In the days before AC (and Charles Towne was founded in the 1600s), apparently such a design, paired with a slightly off-kilter orientation toward the harbor, enabled a sea breeze to blow through and, if not actually cool things off, exchange stale inside air for oppressive outside air. And, with the likes of Blackbeard hanging around, probably the air inside was pretty stinky.



My favorite Charleston sight today was at the elementary school we visited for work, where one of the books in the office was titled "Pirates Don't Change Diapers." That's funny, I thought that's what swashbuckling meant - as in, "little Johnny, does that lovely aroma arising from your backside mean that you need your swash buckled?"

Yesterday's favorite sight happened at the dock of family friends, who live on the intracoastal waterway. We walked through their spongy yard, past an awfully realistic fake dead plastic bird (the coastal version of an owl) to the wooden walkway that wound through some reeds. I spied little black crabs that looked like spiders. I have a friend who is scared of spiders and I wonder: if something looks like a spider but isn't a spider, is it still scary? Other local animal life apparently includes dolphins and alligators which made an appearance in my friends' neighborhood recently. You know what they say: if anything will make a cat neurotic, it's an alligator. So far my scariest creature feature has been with these beautiful dark blue bugs the size of a hummingbird. They live in the trees - Charleston is famous for live oaks and the Spanish moss with which they live in harmony.



Last Charleston lesson for the day: don't touch the Spanish moss because it contains chiggers which will cause you to itch for a week and a half. And that will make Oscar pitch a fit.