It's Hot

Normally the mild climate is one of my favorite aspects of North Carolina life, but we have been having a stretch of That Weather here in NC. Over one hundred degrees, steamy humid, make-up melting, hair frizzing heat. Weather of the sort that only those who have lived some portion of their life in the deep South can really identify with, the sort that explains why native Southerners have evolved the ability to drive with the backs of their thighs lifted off the seat and steer only with the tips of their index fingers. 

You would assume that a lifetime of intermittent exposure to this sort of heat would acclimate a person.  But in my experience it has the opposite effect. I've seen Californians fan their way philosophically through the occasional hot week with no air conditioning, treating it as a mildly unpleasant novelty that will soon pass. But a broken AC unit in the middle of a Southern summer is a full-force natural disaster that will induce cursing and spitting at the repairman in otherwise polite and kindly little old ladies. Telling a Southerner that there is no air conditioning in his forseeable future is like saying to a heroin addict "we're all out for the summer, but I can get you some more in mid to late September".  We are air conditioning junkies and we need our fix. 

Which makes me all the more in awe of my children.  They seem blissfully unaware that the atmosphere outside is approaching the point where we could bake cookies on the hood of our automobile.  They ask to go to the playground and moan when it's time to come home.  They go to camp and ride horses (ugh! imagine the amount of body heat produced by an exercising half-ton mammal!).  In general, they go right on with their little kid lives, sweating like piglets to cool themselves off just as nature intended. 

I know that a day is coming when they will notice.  They will look up one day and say "Man, it is HOT in here" and will grump about the ruin of their plans for the weekend and will complain about how long it takes the air conditioner to cool the car off and how inconsiderate the parking lot planners were to plant only two tiny shade trees in an acre of concrete. In other words, they will become grownups.  And I will be a little sad, remembering their small red faces and the way their hair used to curl up in sweaty ringlets on their necks, and how they used to be too busy enjoying life to care that it's HOT.