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Staying alive in the sweltering heat 

Mon, 07/30/2018 - 2:36 pm

Some people who don’t live in Texas have no idea what summer means. Although in parts of this state the days are warm and the nights chilly, in South Texas, morning breaks with a steamy 85 and builds in a roiling boil to top a hundred degrees – before the summer season has even officially begun.

As June turns to July, the heat is on. Was it always this hot, we ask. Have we become soft? I think not. 

This last week was hotter than most of us have seen in a long time. As a matter of fact, my daughter called to see if I was still here. She was afraid the Rapture had taken the good guys up and left the rest of us in Hell. It kinda worried me, but I told her I was pretty sure Texans wouldn’t be the only people “feeling the heat.”

Nope. We Texans have seen it this hot before and we have not faltered. We have not all moved to Alaska. We suffer along, complaining, sweating, dreading the day the electric bill will arrive. But we soldier on, avoiding heavy clothing, aluminum park benches and crowded rooms.

We know that it will get better soon. After the temperature reached 118 degrees the other day, I told my sister that at least we had seen the worst.

“July is almost over,” I said. She looked at me as if I were crazy, and answered, “What makes you think August is going to be any better?” 

For some reason, I had completely forgotten about August. By the time September gets here, we will be walking around in a sepia-tinted world. Our hair will be fried, our skin a rusty, cracked shell inside of which we scurry from one shady spot to another. Most of us will shelter inside our air-conditioned homes, praying that the squeaking sound coming from that old air-conditioning unit in the backyard is not foretelling doom before the cool returns in the fall. “Just one more year, Lord. Let that old unit hold on until we get the car paid off.”

I was actually in Colorado last week where they had problems of their own, with forest fires and clouds of lung-strangling smoke. Road crews suffered in 90-degree weather to get the roads ready for the winter traffic. (Something is wrong with that reality.) 

Although some looked beaten-down by the heat, they knew nothing of melted shoe soles and searing tool handles. Nothing in their world can be compared to those working knee-deep in molten asphalt south of town. 

Here in Texas we had real heat last week. The only way to survive is to do what Texans have been doing for hundreds of years: wear big hats, stay inside in the heat of the day, drink plenty of water, and pray we didn’t miss that last train to Heaven.