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 was actually chilly one night walking in our neighborhood. I sometimes wore a sweater in the office.
Now I’ve turned into a sweater. I sweat while I’m blow-drying my hair in the morning, which is preceded by drinking one or two cups of hot coffee.
A friend of mine posted on Facebook that she is “breaking up” with summer. Although she’s never been a winter person, she said, the heat is just too much for her. One of her hashtags was #humidityishorrific.
Another one posted: In a relationship with — Air Conditioner.
Yep. Summer in the South is like childbirth. You enjoy a lot of special moments and forget the pain till you do it again.
My husband and I started talking about hot summers. I remember it got so hot several years ago when I had one of my mini-vans that the glue holding the rear-view mirror gave up, and the mirror just fell off.
Now I put my reflective sun shade in the window of my vehicle every time I get out. Every little bit helps.
My mother and I went to a National Federation of Press Women conference once 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 many 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 the hard court burning your skin.”
Just one more reason I don’t play tennis — or any sport.
My husband checked the weather before we went on our nightly walk. It was 93, but if we waited till 8 p.m., he said it would cool down to 87. So we waited and got home in the dark.
We better enjoy it. August will probably be worse.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.