Beat the heat (a politics-free zone)
It’s summer. I would bet that, right now, the vast majority of you are living in places that are quite warm, not to say hot.
I don’t know about you, but although I love summer–glorious flowers, lazy hazy crazy days (my goodness, those lyrics are abominable!), daylight until 8:30 PM, and outdoor ice cream stands finally open–I hate the heat. Absolutely hate it, and it only gets worse as I get older. And, although New England is probably considerably cooler than the rest of the country, it still often gets really, really hot here.
So I thought it would be a good time for this. Click on some of the links, too. Enjoy.
I like the lyrics. “those days of soda and pretzels and beer.”
Love the beer part.
Kalroy
I’m with you. I lived and learned in the South for some years. I found the people delightful, but the heat utterly defeated me, and I retreated to the more temperate climate in which I grew up.
I’m a lifelong northener, but in my experience, the younger generation of yankees are a marginally more heat-tolerant than southerners. We still keep our windows open and walk, instead of using central air and driving everywhere. I know it’s a generalization based on a small sample size, but that’s what I’ve observed.
I grew up in the Deep South, where it is hotter than hell, but shady at least and easy-going.
Talleyrand said that no one born after the French Revolution would ever know the sweetness of life.
I say no one who has never eaten home-made peach ice-cream on a porch in Georgia on a late afternoon in July has ever known the sweetness of life.
Summer is worse up north, where I am now, with hardly any shade and no concessions made by the puritan ethic to warmer weather.
Here in South Louisiana, it is hotter than it is in Rabat ,Morocco. What’s wrong with this picture?
Sweatingly yours,
The heat in West Texas feels better than usual to me this year. A function, I think, of emerging from heart surgery last December when it was bitter cold outside making it hard to partake of the fresh air.
I’m back up to walking over 2 miles a day now and the extreme heat, 98-100° helps toughen me up. What I don’t like, however, is the large high pressure area hanging over us that has precluded clouds from forming. Clouds offer some relief from 14 hours of sun and in West Texas give some measure of perspective to the vast skies and spaces.
Days of cloudlessness edges me into a funk. When out at an oil well surrounded by flatness, the cloudless sky and the heat one can easily imagine that he is parked on Mars.