This Month's Story

I’d like to insert a story about how different it is for us live here on a farm in the Laurel Highlands of southwest Pennsylvania and our former home in Mississippi. This story started me realizing how strong the changes are when a neighbor stopped by and complained about the weather or, more specifically, the heat. It’s been in the upper eighties for a week and threatens to hit ninety.

I agreed with him; it was hot. Stella later commented after he left that I had changed. She was right. There was a time when being in the eighties felt good and it was the nineties and the threat of topping a hundred that was bad. I wrote a story about that heat once and put it in a book, Where the Blue Herons Dance. The book has long been out of print, but I present the story here one more time to show how, in coastal Mississippi, it really can get hot.

* * *

It does get hot here. It’s early August and the heat has been hammering us since June. Our summers can be hot, and we sort of expect the heat. But this summer seems to be exceptionally hot, and the heat is lasting a lot longer than normal.

Last weekend, Stella and I worked outside making wooden frames to cover the sides of the porch’s new sliding glass doors. The old doors had been there twenty-five, years and they had started to move about in their jambs. This not only let in heat; it let in moisture. We had to do something, and the new doors were our answer.

There are four porch doors and, since the frames were to cover the two outside flanges of each, we had to make a grand total of eight frames. I planned to use redwood rescued from when we replaced the old porch. The wood was badly scarred and so, to make it both look smooth and to restore its red color, I used a 12” planer to shave a quarter inch off the surface layer of each board.

For such a small job, it seemed too much trouble to move the planer to the front porch. Besides, planning that much wood generates a lot of sawdust, and it seemed better to leave the mess in back where it was easier to clean up.

I also thought it easier to leave the radial saw back there for the same reasons. Since we are dealing with wood here, each frame had a slightly different length with the differences ranging from a quarter- to a half-inch; this meant carrying eight sets of separate measurements back to the planer and saw.

At first things went along fairly well.

We had started early in the day when the heat was in the mid-eighties with just the porch fans giving a nice breeze. However, there was no breeze in the back. And of course there was the humidity.

As we walked back and forth, our bodies quickly became covered with sweat. To make it more uncomfortable, the sawdust generated by our cutting stuck to that sweat. I didn’t have a shirt on and I soon became caked with sawdust.

Gradually, as the morning passed, the heat increased. With this increase, we started making mistakes and found we were having to go back to the saw for a second cut or starting over on a new board.

We began to snap at each other.

These snaps didn’t bother Jennie, (the old Weimaraner hound we had then). She lay sprawled out in the shadows of the porch alternating between watching us and sleeping, letting the breeze from the fans give her what little coolness there was. Holly, our black tomcat, was smarter; he stayed inside in the air conditioning under the couch, stretched out, sound asleep.

We kept pushing, trying to get the doors done; telling each other that this wasn’t that big a job.

We were on the last frame when I realized that we hadn’t exchanged a snap for some time. I had paused and was mutely staring at a board that I had cut too short. This was the second time that I had cut the board for the frame wrong. What was worse, each wrong cut involved measuring and going to the back to plane and cutting a new board.

I looked over at Stella. She had sat down in one of the porch chairs and was staring at the same offending board. I got up and still carrying the board, walked over to the porch thermometer fastened to the shady side of one of the porch posts.

It read ninety-eight. It appeared to waver as I looked at it as if it was about to go higher.

I had had to step over Jennie to get to the thermometer. Her eyes had followed me as I stepped over her, but no other part of her moved, and it was obvious that no part of her would move. It was too hot, and worst of all, it was going to get hotter. She didn’t need a thermometer to tell her that.

To get back to the door, I would have to step over her again. I realized I didn’t want to. It would take too much effort. I stood there looking at the thermometer.

Around me, there was no breeze; the porch fans seemed useless. I put the wrong cut board I had in my hand down and started picking up the tools.

Stella watched me for a long second and then got up and began to help pick things up. When we had gathered everything, we carried them around to the back. Jennie followed listlessly. Maybe we would let her inside with Holly.

After putting everything away, we went into the enclosed spa area where there was an open shower and we took turns letting the cold water flow over our faces and bodies.

Later, we sat in the dining room drinking iced sun tea and eating a late lunch; a cold salad made with tomatoes from Stella’s garden and diced leftover pork chops.

One of the glass doors faced the dining room. The work we had done on this set of glass doors looked good. Very good, in fact. We couldn’t see the door that we had stopped work on. That was on the other end of the porch, by the front bedroom.

I knew it was there, though. It could wait.

I stared moodily out the door.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

Stella got up and got some more sun tea. She knew better. She had heard the TV weatherman report that the heat index was one hundred ten and that we should expect the same tomorrow.

“Or maybe November,” she said pouring the tea into our glasses. We sat there drinking ice tea and looking out on the glazed waters of the Mississippi Sound.

The sky seemed to hang low over the glassy water as if it were a heavy blanket. There was a gray, almost palpable fuzziness to its blue color.

There was no wind.

Although it was mid afternoon, the sun lacked clarity, and the water had a dull sheen, a metallic flatness to it. A short distance out from our beach, two shrimp boats nested together, bow to stern. No one was moving on them. They’d be there till nightfall.

It was hot and nothing was moving.

“All right,” I agreed after a bit. “Maybe November.”