There’s nothing like a Southern summer. Nothing. Sorry to my snowbird friends but getting through late August in Georgia is damn near surviving the apocalypse. And that’s the word for it. Survival.
It’s in this barren, climactic wasteland that the sinister can go full throttle. Everyone’s on edge. Irritably hungry, for a month and a half. There’s no relief and so urges and impulses gain power. The ever-present salty film on every inch of skin. Clothes stick to all the wrong places, sliding into every wrong crevice. Socks become wet washcloths shoved into shoes over damp feet. Squinting becomes your resting expression.
It will make a person cranky. It gets inside the head—heat rises, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone blows their lid after four weeks of ninety plus and a hundred percent humidity. I could kick a door just thinking about it.
Because there’s a break from school for kids, and people are blowing their wads on vacations, we’re led to believe summer is the reprieve we all need from real life. The living is supposed to be easy, the times good, feet up, drinks on ice, kids in the pool.
And it is all that, but it’s also an oven with the broiler on high, a sun that won’t quit its aggressive hovering. A cloud can bring a person to their knees with gratitude, as can the sound of a crow in the morning, because the crows only mess with this place when it’s cooled off. I doubt God even lives here in late August. If you can cook an egg on your dashboard, the Almighty’s out, at least for a couple of weeks.
And it’s in this boiling pot that some people really come off the rails. They’re the splattering oil. It’s aggravation, this needling, insistent sweat trails down a person’s spine, or the inability to sleep when the air is so thick and still, that it feels like a sweater, that pushes people to do something they might not have in a milder climate. Urgency is created by discomfort.
It also gives people bad ideas. Endless hot days are a trial. I know, I know, people talk about being stuck in the house during a hard winter, but a person can be stuck in the house during a hard summer too. The days go on for longer—interminable daylight hours lived in swarms of bugs, with the constant, terrifying threat of the air conditioning going out. The gnats are invisible, but their resulting welts are not. And to the untrained eye the cynicism is invisible, but the resulting disharmony is not.
Statistically, more crimes, especially violent ones, are committed during the summertime. As someone who lives in a two-month long mosquito-infested heat wave every year, I’m not surprised.
Even the rain is violent in the summer. The afternoon storms are more like battles than reprieves from the pressure of the sun. Angry wind bends tree branches and sideswipes saplings. The thunder and lightning seem to be engaged in a drunken bar brawl in a black sky. And when the rain stops, steam rises from the blazing pavement, sending even more heat and caustic damp into the atmosphere. Summer wind is like a high-powered hair dryer when all you want is a cool wave.
Agitation is the answer to every moment. Grating, poking, stifling agitation.
We also have barbecues, swimming pools, beautiful lakes and flourishing gardens. We have the singing cicadas, the watercolor skies, and the sweet peaches and blueberries…but if you look closely enough, you’ll see it’s melting, like our residents’ resolve. The promise to be good is like a popsicle left on a patio table – it quickly loses form.
We’re so sweet but we’re also so hard. Don’t underestimate someone who can mow their lawn at two PM on a late summer day down south. You have no idea what else they’re capable of.
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