Nobody on this porch tries to beat the heat. They outwait it. Linda B's "Keeping Cool At Grandma's" remembers an afternoon, or really a whole run of afternoons, in which comfort is a collection of small habits: cool sheets, a book, a makeshift fan, a glass of lemonade. The central idea is that people can get through discomfort by sharing it, and that a childhood memory can hold a whole way of life in a handful of ordinary details.
The grandmother is the only person we hear speak, and her few lines are the funniest in the poem. She shakes her hankie at her face and announces, "Pshaw! It's not as hot as last summer, just a bit close is all." Her gesture contradicts her words, since nobody waves a hankie that hard in mild weather. Yet her denial is a kind of generosity. She won't let the heat become a topic, so she answers it with hospitality: "Have some more lemonade." The comparison to "last summer" is a nice touch too, because it makes the present misery sound like the lesser of two evils.
The uncle's errand gives the poem its most vivid sensory writing. He is sent for "a nickel's worth of ice chips," and we're told he "stay[s] there long as he could, / in that coldest spot in town." The speaker clearly sees through him, and the line carries a quiet wink. Then comes the best phrase in the poem: he is "filling his body with smells of sawdust and ice blocks." The verb makes cold something he breathes in and stores up, like a swimmer taking a lungful of air. The poem never explains the sawdust, and it doesn't need to. A dry, woody smell set beside frozen water feels both surprising and true. Meanwhile the children back on the porch have "tired of turning pages," a phrase that echoes the fanning motions earlier in the poem, as if boredom and heat were the same restless movement of the hand.
The form suits this slow pace. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, only the loose rhythm of someone telling a story aloud. Lines stretch out like the afternoon, and then a short one lands with relief: "on cool sheets." Even on the page, that is where the poem seems to lie down. The verbs matter as well. Nearly everything is in the habitual "would" form (we'd lie, she'd send, he'd stay), so one afternoon stands in for many summers. Memory has blended them together, which is how childhood summers are usually remembered.
The ending changes the pace. "The sun had begun that downturn and we could feel / the thermometer slide too" turns the day into something like a graph, with the only mention of an instrument coming just as the grandmother's claim that it isn't hot is finally allowed to be true. Then the lines shrink into household orders: "Time to start supper, / lay the table." They have no subjects, as if the chores were simply in the air. The last line stretches out again: "And wait for Grandpa to come in from the fields." The poem began with waiting out the heat and ends with waiting for the one person who has actually worked in it. Grandpa never appears, yet the whole structure of the day is organised around him. The leisure on the porch sits beside work that goes unseen, and the poem says so only through where it puts him, at the very end.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It states no moral and never says "those were the good days." It trusts its details: the church pictures used as fans, the nickel, the ice house, the lemonade. Judging by those details, this is a world without air-conditioning, where cooling off meant inventing something with whatever was at hand, and the poem suggests it was a shared invention. The title's "Grandma" is the child's word, while the poem itself says "Grandmother," as if the adult looking back has grown more formal and more respectful. Under the humour there is affection, and the poem leaves it unspoken.