Today is the summer solstice, often referred to as the longest day of the year. Of course, all days consist of 24 hours, so what is meant by the longest day of the year is that summer solstice is the day there is more daylight than any other.
Here in the Golden Triangle, the summer solstice will be both long and hot, with temperatures flirting with triple digits through early next week and no relief at all until Sunday, when thunderstorms may provide brief respites from the sweltering heat.
In our part of the world, there are really only two seasons. Spring and fall are ambiguous – you never know what you’re going to get. We’re mostly a summer/winter place. The winters are short and mild, the summers long and unrelenting.
Even so, summer has always been my favorite season. I enjoy its pace — everything slows down — and the nostalgia of youth it conjures. Winter memories are mostly Christmas for me, but summer evokes a flood of tastes, smells, sensations and distant memories of people and places and objects that might otherwise be lost in the fog of time.
I’m not alone in this.
Literature and poetry, especially American literature and poetry, have long reflected on summer days.
One of the best descriptions is found in Harper Lee’s masterwork, “To Kill A Mockingbird” where she describes a summer day of a small Alabama town in the 1920s.
She wrote:
“Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
The Mississippi town of my youth didn’t feature mules or stiff collars. I have no idea how often ladies bathed then or if they took afternoon naps.
The summers of my youth were men abandoning their suit jackets for short-sleeved dress shirts and clip-on ties for Sunday church services. It was cars without air-conditioning, holding our faces to the little triangle-shaped window vents that breathed air — hot air, but air nonetheless — into the sauna of the sedan.
It was the time when all children were feral. Kids lived their summers outdoors. If you remained inside during a summer day, it could only mean one of two things: You were sick or you were being punished.
Summer was half-naked boys playing baseball in pastures, layers of sweaty grime painted on their sun-bronzed bodies.
It was a time when a quarter got you into the public pool. The pool opened at 1 p.m. and closed at 6 and we stayed and played every minute, biking home with ravenous appetites in sun-beaten exhaustion.
It was a time of picking vegetables and shelling peas and butterbeans under the shade of an oak tree in the backyard. It meant splitting a watermelon and scooping out the succulent heart with your fingers and devouring it on the spot, the juices flowing down your chin, neck and arms until you were a sticky, bloated mess.
It meant churning ice-cream on the old hand-cranked bucket ice-maker.
It meant the best water you ever drank came from a garden hose on a hot summer day.
It meant listening to old men swap yarns in the dark coolness of the hardware store — “I swear it wuz so hot yesterday, I saw a dog chasin’ a cat and they wuz both walkin.”
Harper Lee’s summers and mine differ only in the details. The sensations are the same.
Each generation has its own rituals of summers, and although I prefer mine above those of younger generations, it’s likely their summer memories will someday be just as rich and poignant.
The heat of a Mississippi summer is a small price to pay for such pleasures and the enduring memories it creates.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
