Also it is moist and humid and more moist... and warm... uncomfy levels of warm... and stormy and humid. Mid October cannot come soon enough.
Facts -
I met a lady recently who’d just moved to the Deep South and was astonished -- bowled over, in fact -- by how hot it is down here.
“How do you stand it?” she moaned. “How will I stand it?”
I gave her the same answer I gave a young man years ago who had moved to Mobile from Colorado. He, too, couldn’t get his head around how truly, breathtakingly, oppressively hot it is in the South.
“My family back home laughed at me when I told them about the heat,” he said. “They reminded me that summers are hot in Colorado, too. I tried to explain the difference, how it’s still hot here at 10 o’clock at night, but I don’t think they believed me.”
Here is what I told them both: First, ignore people who say, “It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.” It’s the heat AND the humidity. Second, understand that the greatest invention in the world is air conditioning and that life in the South revolves around it.
Third, embrace the concept that summer is a state of mind. Seasonal calendars say summer begins June 21 and ends Sept. 22. Here, however, it starts the first week of May and does not end until the first week or two in October.
Think about it: Summer takes up nearly half the year, bringing with it soaring temperatures, suffocating humidity, fat and sassy roaches, aggressive mosquitoes, grass that needs to be mowed every four or five days, and thunderstorms that come out of nowhere to dump three or four inches of rain on your neighborhood while the sun shines and the sky is clear five miles up the road.
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As Scarlett O’Hara said, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy.” And you will, too, if you think of summer as six months. So don’t.
In my altered state of mind, Memorial Day is not the signal that summer is here, and neither is June 21. No matter how hot it is, I will not acknowledge that summer has arrived until the Fourth of July, which knocks off two months on the front end.
On the back end, most schools now start a few weeks before Labor Day, so why let summer hang around beyond August? Thus, instead of almost six months, summer becomes barely two months long. Think of May and June as very hot extensions of spring, and September and early October as very hot precursors of fall.
Even Scarlett could cope with eight weeks of summer.
Neither of my new acquaintances was prepared for summer in the South, however, and both mentioned that where they came from, many homes were not air-conditioned. Fans were sufficient, they assured me.
They might have been on the verge of suggesting that air conditioning contributes to global warming, but I was already rending my garments at the thought of anyone anywhere eschewing the technology that liberated the South.
"Somehow, it was hotter then,” Harper Lee wrote in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was set in the 1930s in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb. “A black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
To my new acquaintances: Welcome to the South, where if your adjust your attitude the summers are only two months long and air conditioning is always your very best friend.
And to people who love to pine for those mythical “good old days” before the world’s greatest invention was invented, you can have them.