In case you haven’t noticed, summer has arrived.
We got off easy at first this year. It seemed like summer might not really come. A breeze was often blowing. I wore a sweater one night in early July while attending an outdoor play.
Now I’ve turned into a sweater. I sweat while I’m blow-drying my hair in the morning, which is followed by drinking a hot cup of coffee.
My husband and I started talking about hot summers. I remember it got so hot several years ago when I had one of my vans that the glue holding the rear-view mirror gave up, and the mirror just fell off.
My mother and I went to a National Federation of Press Women conference in Arizona, and the thermometer hit 110 one day as we were walking around downtown.
“But it’s a dry heat,” the locals like to say. It is like being on the face of the sun.
It’s a vacation to South Carolina that comes to mind, though, when I think about the hottest I’ve ever been. There wasn’t anything special about the weather — just a humid, stick-your-head-in-an-oven heat that took your breath away. I just remember trying to walk around and see the sights, and I was miserable, even in the shade.
My husband also recalls a trip to South Carolina as his hottest experience. (Of course, he would relate it to golf. He can relate anything to golf.)
It was at Kiawah Island, where he was playing with a group of family members. It was July, and although they usually played golf in the morning, for some reason, they had an afternoon tee time.
“Not only was it extremely hot and humid when we teed off, but this particular course was built among the dunes along the beach,” my husband said. “This meant there was basically no shade anywhere on the course. Also, if you weren’t in the fairway or on a green, you were in the dunes, with the heat radiating off the sand. The wind was blowing, but it felt more like a blast furnace and offered no relief. When we finished, we looked like a bunch of exhausted, drowned rats.”
My husband said 15 years later that he and his brother were talking about golf with another man, who asked what was the hottest they had ever been on a golf course. “We answered instantly, ‘Kiawah,’” my husband said.
I remember talking with a former co-worker once about the hottest he ever remembers being. He said “years and years” ago, he used to play competitive tennis, and sometimes court temperatures would reach 130 degrees. “You’d fall down, and it’d feel like you had a carpet burn, or you scraped yourself, but it was just hard court burning your skin.”
I have a co-worker now who is taking his family to Six Flags this week in San Antonio, Texas. Knowing how hot it will be, he has a cooler that he said he will fill with ice, then he has a fan rigged up to it that will blow out cool air. He’s going to put it in the little wagon his youngest will ride in. I’ll bet they’re all in the wagon by the end of the day.
My husband and I are walking around our neighborhood later and later each night, trying to avoid the heat.
One of our neighbors asked how we were doing as he was bringing out his trash can.
I said fine, but I complained about the heat.
“Well, it is July,” he said, laughing.
He has a point.
We better enjoy it. August could be worse.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.