Very, very hot.

It had been a really ridiculously hot summer. I mean really hot. Usually Oklahoma has ups and downs, a few days of scorching heat interspersed with a couple only moderately oven-like and even a day or two of overcast coolness. But this year I think we went a good month and half without seeing a high temperature under 100. That's 100 degrees Fahrenheit, of course. And therein lies a tale.

Nellie knew it had been hot; each Tuesday when I came from work, she could tell (when she paid attention) that I was fairly weary from the heat. One day she asked me just how hot it was. It happened to be a record-breaking week, and I told her the temperature was 112.

"What is that in Celsius?" she wondered. "I'm still not used to that other system."

I never have been very good at remembering the exact conversion formula, so I gave her my best guess. "I'm not exactly sure," I told her, "but I think it's somewhere around 45 degrees in Celsius."

"Oh, surely not!" Nellie exclaimed. "That would be really, really hot."

"Well," I assured her, "it is very hot."

"Yes," she nodded, "but surely not that hot. Why do you Americans use that 'Fahrenheit' temperature, anyway?"

Before I came to visit the next week, I happened to see the time and temperature on a local bank: 109 F, or 43 C. I stored away the information to share with Nellie, and accordingly, when I saw her on Tuesday I told her what I'd learned. "So 112 would be about 45 Celsius," I concluded, just a little pleased with myself for being pretty close to right.

"Oh, well," Nellie waved it off. "That's not all that hot."

I was a bit nonplussed. "What? But last week you said it was really, really hot."

"Oh, it's warm, to be sure. But not all that hot. I remember when I was a girl, and the temperature was 60 degrees Celsius. That was really, really hot. We opened all the windows, but I could hardly breathe. Forty-five isn't that bad."

For the record, I checked: 60 C works out to about 140 F. I don't believe, somehow, that Nellie ever had a 60 degree summer in Russia. But what do I know?