Try To Get Cooled Off

I’m fixing to try to get cooled off.

Everybody’s been complaining about how hot it is. One fellow told me it was so hot that he saw two trees fighting over the same dog.

It’s July, and in the south that’s when it gets hotter than blue blazes.

And if it doesn’t rain the heat intensifies, the gardens burn up, everything gets dusty and stifling, and some folks get ornery.

The only relief is when a thunderstorm pops up and cools things down a little bit, but they can’t be predicted. When it’s a 100 degrees you can toss weather prediction out the window.

I knew one weather man who abandoned all his meteorology skills in July and just used a weather dog. Just before broadcast time he would send his dog outside. If he came back inside wet, he would predict rain, and if he didn’t come back at all he would say it was going to be real windy.

I remember one hot sleepless July night back in 1949, when my brother Fred introduced me to air conditioning. We were lying on our bed in pools of sweat staring at the open window hoping for some relief, but none came.

It astonished me when my brother leapt out of bed, rousted me up, stripped the sheet off the bed and threw it out the window. When I saw him climb out the window after the sheet, I figured the heat had finally taken its toll and he had gone completely bonkers.

But then he called for me to follow him outside, and I did because I trusted my brother.

There was a large barrel outside that caught rain water when it came off the eve of the house. He doused our sheet in the rain barrel, extracted it, gave me one end and told me to twist. We twisted and twisted that sheet until instead of being wet it was just damp. Then we tossed it through the window back inside and climbed in after it.

I followed my brother’s instructions and we furled that damp sheet out and jumped under it just before it settled down on top of us. I lay there bewildered for a few moments, then a little breeze started waffling the sheet over our bodies and it wasn’t long before I got chilled and had goose bumps.

In fact, later in the evening I exchanged that sheet for a warm quilt.

I know it won’t cool me down as fast as it happened that night, but I’m fixing to turn the thermostat way down.