Down South
Too Darn Hot
You can’t see it, although it’s colored red on the weather map—a radiant, shapeless mass, molten as lava. Its heat makes the distances smoke and shimmer like a mirage.
You can’t touch it, but it touches you in the morning when you open the door—that curtain of humidity between your front door and the morning paper. You hurry back in so as not to let the air out.
You can’t hear it, though it changes the nature of sound. The whole neighborhood seems blanketed, muffled. Only the things closest to you—the flapping of a bird’s wings, the sprinkler’s staccato—seem distinct on the heavy air.
It’s summer.
Southerners have an indescribably close relationship with summer. To us, it is both fact and fiction, metaphor and mind-set, cause for escape and reason to engage, something to endure and enjoy. Summer here is not just about heat—the East Coast and the West can get pretty hot too—but something about all that humidity and semitropical climate in the South makes the matter one for the guidebooks. It’s a jungle down here. Trees grow, and then the kudzu grows over the trees. Green on green, layer on layer. Summer in the South is like gin to tonic: The one brings the other to a fuller appreciation of each.
It is perhaps for this reason that summer in the South is something to write about. Songs are dedicated to the hot months below the Mason-Dixon. The work of our greatest writers seems stuck in a state of perpetual heat. Think about Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men or William Faulkner’s Light in August.
Now that summer is here, conventional wisdom of stereotyped Southern behavior holds that it’s time for us to porch sit with fan in hand, shoes kicked off, and crank some ice cream. But more than likely, the season will instead steer us indoors to electrically cooled regions, BTUs depressing the thermal readings to the point where we’ll feel capable of life itself.
That doesn’t mean we have abandoned anything Southern in relation to summer. We still maintain that sense of lethargy when hit hard by the temperature. It’s on our minds while it slows us down. In the last few days, every conversation between people starts with the weather. “Whew.” “Hot.” “Oh my.” “Stay cool.” Our sentences are stunted because our minds are stunned.
We still put mint in things. We wake up early to finish chores. We turn the garden hose on the dog to cool him off. Bottles of beer stacked in neat rows and topped with ice cubes in an ice chest become for us a kind of artwork. While taking the last run of the day on water skis, as the sun falls below a soft, Tennessee hill, the existence of God Almighty is never in doubt.
At its height, we’re convinced summer will never end. But in a blink of an eye, autumn will have arrived, and we will have wondered where it all went.
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