My Front Porch ~ Hot Enuf Fer Ya!

     

      Sometimes life comes at you fast!  Summer has been a blur.  We don't know when it started and we might not know when it ends. I think we are all bit confused and disoriented here in the Southeast. Typically we have a really rainy April, a hot sunny May, a little cool spell the first of June right before the Southern summer sun turns up the sweltering heat and the humidity goes through the roof.

      It can be so humid in July that you break into a sweat walking across the porch. The air here is like water suspended in mid-air, hanging and sticking to you all over.That's our usual SC summer. We have a general idea of when to enjoy an occasional, perfectly sunny, breezy day and when to crank up our collective complaining about the heat, as if it had never even been that hot before.  Every year it strangely surprises us, even though we know it's coming.

     You see, we just  l-o-v-e to talk about the weather here in the South.  In fact,  we just love to talk, and the weather is a good starting place.  Southerners are not usually comfortable being quiet.  I suppose we think it is a bit rude, so we engage in any number of awkward conversations with perfect strangers just to avoid the appearance of lacking hospitality.  We talk to strangers in elevators, standing in check-out lines, doctor offices, street corners. At any point that there at least two people caught up in the same spot, after, I would say about 20 good long seconds of silence, the awkward, but cordial conversation begins.

"Phew! Hot enough for ya?"

" Sure is, I just don't remember it being this hot!"

"I don't either, and I grew up down in Newberry with no air conditionin', but it just didn't seem this hot!"

"Newberry?  Where abouts in Newberry?  My cousin married a boy from Newberry and they lived down by that big farm off the interstate."

"What's your cousin's name? 'Cause my mother's cousin on her daddy's side married a girl from up this way."

"Her name is Jenny, Jenny Watkins. She's married to Jimmy Watkins."

" Well, my lands, that's my cousin twice removed! We are practically family!"

     Y'all might think I'm exaggerating, but that is what happens around here.  You might not know somebody, but in no time flat, you can start to connect the dots.  I recently overheard a girl dressed up for her high school prom get in a conversation with somebody's granny in the bathroom of a restaurant.  Neither one could wrap up the conversations until they landed on a connection between the girl and the granny's granddaughter whose prom was the week before. They established the girl's date was related to the granddaughter's date by marriage. I promise I'm not making this stuff up.

     Here's the biggest hoot of all. It all started with the weather.  The granny said, "You look mighty pretty honey, I'm glad it didn't rain on y'all tonight like it was supposed to."  You see this was back in April when it was supposed to rain and didn't.  April was like a long beautiful spring day with a few scattered showers. Before we realized it was going to last, it was over.  We kept waiting for the rain and we were afraid to plan on it not raining, because we just don't trust April like that. By May, we knew we could count on warm summer days. Oh May teased us with a few hot days, but then it started raining . . . and raining . . and raining. It even rained through most of June and into July, and I don't mean just a little rain either, I mean like hurricane without the winds kind of rain where your yard turns into a shallow pond and your driveway like an instant river.


     If it was any hotter, we would think we had slipped down the map towards Florida. If it had been cooler, we would have thought we were transplanted to Maine.  With this crazy weather, we have simply been confused.  We have been pleasantly surprised by the cooler temperatures and at a loss of how to live with this rain.  Why we hardly even know how to complain the weather, but don't worry, we have managed to collectively question the monsoon.

     The blessing in it all is that come rain or shine, Southerns have something to talk about. I think I feel most sorry for the baggers who carry groceries to the car for customers.  I expect they hear 100 weather stories a day. ;-)  Amazingly, they are gracious all day long with their "yes mam, this rain is something else " as if they had not heard the same old thing all day long. 

     This rain has made us mindful who folks who live with it all the time. This rain has made us mindful that life is unpredictable. This rain has made us mindful that perfect strangers could, and would mind you, pull together and build and ark if necessary. (I have heard many conversations to that effect . . . mostly waiting in line at the grocery store, lol)  

       This rain will give us something to talk about for years to come. "Now when I was just 50 years old, back in 2013, it was the rainiest summer I remembered in my whole life. The rain started in May and went clear through . . ."  Frankly, I am looking forward to having a bunch of little grand-children to love and climb on me and listen to my stories, at least until the figure out that I really don't know very much at all. ;-) Perhaps, they will humor me, right here on my front porch. 
©Lori Pruett 2013

  I am delighted to team up for a front porch series with one of my dearest friends in all the world, Elizabeth Ours, who hosts the blog Yes They’re All Ours. She lives on the warm, sunny Georgia coast, while we are nestled in the a little cabin in the woods of the SC mountains.