To quote the Willie Nelson song, I woke up still not dead again today. Lying hot and heavy, but covered with fizz: a fine allover network of sweat beads, twinkling to the swash/tick of the overhead fan.
I felt like meat loaf spiced with mint.
Not like eating meat loaf spiced with mint. Too hot for that. Like I was meat loaf spiced with mint.
You can say I’m overdramatizing. Well, you try waking up age eighty-two in New Orleans and feeling on yourself a cool sizzle.
Southern heat! It’s got not just degrees to it, but depths and aspects.
And now the whole earth is getting more Southern, heat-wise.
You can’t sum up the issue by: “Hyoooooo-ee. Whew! It is sho, befo’ God, hot.”
Though that statement helps. Like all the old figures of speech.
How hot was it? Hotter than:
A two-dollar pistol, a mile of Georgia asphalt, the hinges of Hades, fish grease, four hogs in a Ford Escort, a five-dollar tool chest.
It was so hot that:
I got home from the grocery and my bacon was all done crispy.
I saw a dog chasing a cat and both of them were walking. Our hen laid a hard-boiled egg. And folks, it’s getting hotter. Growing up, I was a heat-hardy boy. Decatur, Georgia, was by no means the world’s most sweltering place, but there were many days when it would just naturally get a good deal hotter than you wished it would.
So? Why did windows have screens? So you could throw them open without letting in bugs. Why did people wave hand-powered fans in church? Well, partly because the fans enabled degrees of audience response; but mainly so worshippers could help the Lord create some breeze.
How about sprinklers in the yard? They were for the grass, but to us running-and-squealing children, they were primarily—like everything else we could get away with—for us.
How about watermelon? How about snow cones? Not to mention, how about sweat? Sweat was greasy as well as cool, but that could be said about a lot of things we Southerners swore to.
You may not believe this, but our house wasn’t air-conditioned, and neither was our car.
The house had electric fans that moved the air around in ways that sounded comforting. The car had those triangular vents next to the front windows that directed the safe-speed-stirred zephyrs in upon us honestly sweaty family. Compare the whoom… whoom…whoom… of a house fan, or the fwoosh of recycled highway breeze, with the grinding drone of the window units that were beginning to be jammed into a window or two of other people’s houses. All that rusty-looking water dribbling out the back of that protruding hunk. Where was that water going? The AC was stronger, to be sure, but a breeze—A breeze was more natural, more salubrious.
Right. Right.
I’ll tell you what hit me, way back in adolescence. I overheard an older girl say, “It’s too hot to smooch.”
I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to imagine—that in the South, in summer, there were things, intensely desirable things, that the South could get too hot for. Outside was simmering something fiercer than I was.
But I could tell this older girl knew more about it than I did.
In time I became, like everybody else, addicted to air-conditioning.
Leap forward to now.
Earth is getting hotter, and AC is partly to blame. The more we use it, the more we need it.
Let’s take an example other than heat. Overpowering cooking odors, say. You create a machine that blows that bad air out into the open where there would seem to be plenty of room for it, but after a while, the whole neighborhood is getting smelly—and the machine itself generates stink. So…
Let’s go back to heat. When the ice floes are melting beneath the polar bears’ feet, people may just say, “Hooo-wee it is hot.” But deep down inside, people are not satisfied by that. People see that a cat on a hot tin roof isn’t just tiptoeing, it is in mortal danger, poor thing, of turning into a baked cat. The polar bears know more about it than we do.
We have made things worse. And we devote a lot of energy to ignoring or even denying it.
It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity.
