“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
WHEN HARPER LEE wrote these sweet and knowing words for Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, it was from personal experience. She understood sweltering Southern summers and the joys and the vicissitudes of living in a small Southern town from growing up in Monroeville, Alabama, where her best friend Truman Capote lived right next door to her. These giants of American and Southern literature were two oddballs who were about 5 years old when they met and clicked as soon as they locked eyes.
Like Scout, Lee was a fierce tomboy who wore overalls while Capote, small for his age and remaining so throughout his life, was a dapper little dresser with a high-pitched voice whom a teacher once described as “a bird of paradise in a flock of crows.” Lee protected Capote from neighborhood bullies, and Capote was the friend Lee needed to explore the detective novels they both loved, including Sherlock Holmes. In the giant chinaberry tree in Lee’s back yard, they read their beloved mysteries, and they tromped around the neighborhood writing stories together, taking turns typing on Lee’s father’s Underwood typewriter. They were Southern storytellers from the time they could make them up.
Here in the South it’s definitely summer again, and summer brings so many feelings and memories. As the song says, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.” It’s easy because the life is being sucked out of us by the natural sauna outside. We don’t feel like doing anything besides staying inside in the air-conditioning—or being by or in the water. When I got up this morning, my windows were foggy, and when I opened the back door to let the dogs out, I walked into a wall of 80% humidity.
The scientific reason is a bit alarming: This phenomenon is driven by the dew point—the exact temperature at which air is fully saturated with moisture and cannot hold it as a gas, forcing it to turn into liquid. When the hot, humid outdoor air touches your chilled, air-conditioned window glass, the air’s temperature drops below its dew point, causing it to sweat on the outside.
These are the kinds of things we Southerners say when the heat is killing us:
It must be 90 degrees in the shade.
This one’s gonna be a scorcher.
It’s hotter’n blue blazes.
It’s hotter’n a blister bug in a pepper patch.
It’s hot as hell.
You could fry an egg on the hood of that car.
It’s not the heat—it’s the humidity. (Maybe/maybe not.)
Somebody fan me.
Crank up that AC till it’s blowing snowballs.
But who can afford that now? If you’re planning a trip to the South, I highly recommend coming in the spring or fall unless you’re going to a lake or beach, and then the heat is do-able. I often wonder how all these Northerners who move South to live cheaper and to get away from cold winters think of it after they experience their first summer that leaves them gasping for breath. The summer sun brings both healing light and a killer sultriness that’s both soupy and stifling.
The first summer the Lone Wolf and I lived in France, 15,000 people died in an intense, prolonged heatwave the French call La Canicule. Canicule specifically implies an extreme weather event where temperatures remain dangerously high 24/7 for several consecutive days, offering no overnight relief. Think of canicule as “the dog days of summer.” Ancient Roman and Greek skygazers noticed that the hottest days of the summer coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which sits in the constellation Canis Major (the Greater Dog). Canicula means “little dog.”
Global warming is literally killing us and those flat-earthers who don’t accept it are about as smart and aware as a cow patty. About the current French heat wave in The Guardian:
Public Health France said it had counted 8,973 deaths so far for that week but cautioned that the number was still only partial. It said the preliminary total was 29% more than the 6,948 deaths registered for the previous week of 15-21 June.
The French officially entered their third canicule for this summer this past Monday, July 6th.
There are societal factors that come into play in these deaths. The French think air conditioning makes you sick. Literally. It’s not an exaggeration but a deeply rooted cultural and medical belief—while we look at AC as a gift from God. There are other factors in these deaths, of course. But the French as well as other Europeans don’t understand air conditioning. They look at it as American excess. There’s a lot of Yankee excessiveness that I happily condemn—but never this.
***
MY OWN ARKANSAS childhood summers were bountiful. Our endowment began with summer produce. Truck farmers came to our front door to sell their homegrown vegetables and fruit. Yellow squash, tomatoes, purple hull peas, corn, okra, and more. Women and children would sit on their porches shelling peas and beans together.
We rode our bikes and trikes freely up and down the sidewalk of our street and played mightily with our neighbors and friends as if the world was ours. We caught lightning bugs and put them in jars with holes poked in the lids to watch their twinkles before we set them free. We swung on our swing set, dug holes in our sandbox, and ran through sprinklers in our swimsuits.
My parents created happy summer days that thrilled us in the weeks that we spent at Blanchard Springs on Sylamore Creek near Mountain View, Arkansas. There was a lodge by the creek, but we piled into the rustic cabins as our grandparents and sometimes aunts, uncles, and cousins joined us. Our Arkansas beach was the rocky creek. We caught crawdads, jumped off ledges, and swam where it was deep. The beauty and authenticity of Blanchard Springs was our heaven. My mother cooked real meals—fried chicken, of course, and fish that my father and grandfather caught. I’m sure she stirred up buttermilk biscuits, fried okra and squash, and baked a pie or two. She definitely would’ve brought homemade cookies and brownies. This was standard procedure for her as was lapping it up for us. These were carefree summer days that defined the tastebuds and the goodness of our family.
Even as young kids, my brothers and I were such accomplished swimmers that the lifeguards at the city pool allowed mother to drop us off and leave us. We could hardly wait to go there every afternoon an hour after lunch. We lived to swim.
When we were older and had moved to the house my parents designed and built, our dad set up croquet and badminton that we’d play every afternoon after he got home from his law office. “Hello, boys and girls, and sweet patootsies!” he always said when he walked in. We ran and jumped into his arms.
Later, when our family started our far-reaching family trips crossing this country almost from coast to coast, down to Mexico City and up to Niagara Falls, water again was the heart of our summer days. Before the Interstates—and after a day of driving—we stopped at our motels in time for a long swim. We jumped, and dived, and flipped off the diving boards, played Marco Polo, and dove to the pools’ bottoms to retrieve whatever we had to throw in.
Then, later still, we drove to Greers Ferry Lake every weekend—which JFK came to inaugurate a few weeks before he was killed—to ski and swim and picnic. But we’d stop by the ice house for an ice block to chip up to cool down our drinks and a watermelon or fuel our ice cream maker that we cranked ourselves. After my father died in that lake, I never wanted to go back. I could forgive the water that gave us such a happy life, but the lake itself was tainted.
Besides my father’s wrecking death, it was these remarkable moments of extraordinary ordinariness that fashioned magic out of our summer days. And this is what I want my grandson Arnold to know in his life as well—the charm of Southern summers that you spend having fun outside and in the water, playing with your family all wrapped in love. I also tried to conjure this for his mother and aunt. I see it when he’s running through the yard on a warm night, twirling himself and bright sparklers. The heat doesn’t even matter then.
Earlier this summer, Arnold and I picked plums together from the loaded branches of our Mirabelle Tree, and he knocked them down from the tall branches. We baked a delicious Plum Cobbler, concocted a tart Plum Jam and a creamy Plum Curd. We played badminton and croquet with our neighbors, drank cool drinks, and ate watermelon. We sunned at the beach, jumped the waves, and rode boogie boards in the surf. In the evening, we walked in the sand to marvel at precious nests of sea turtles.
Not to miss a political opportunity, I took Arnold to his first Democratic rally, where we sat under a live oak tree, ate fried catfish, and listened to stump speeches—it can’t get any more old-timey Southern than that. There, Arnold met the next senator of South Carolina, Dr. Annie Andrews, who gave him a T-shirt—and I was proud. But in all these experiences, the generations of our family are united in consciousness and spirit. In the memories that we make and the stories that we tell, our hands touch theirs, and we hold on.
When the Beasts of the Southern Wild came out, and its magical realism lifted our awareness about the rising seas and what it would mean to people who didn’t have much and would lose it all—their land and their homes—it took my breath away. It was not just a Louisiana summer but a mystical yet simple story of people who were surviving on the fringe and wanted to live life on their own terms and with dignity.
The stark reality is that our coasts are fast disappearing. And what about our natural habitat, our stories and memories that are tied here in the marshes and the streams that hold their cadences?
In South Carolina now: Donald Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices led directly to the gutting of federal wetland protections [Sackett v. EPA], leaving millions of critical, flood-absorbing acres vulnerable to immediate destruction and development for greedy corporate profit. Because South Carolina lacked state-level freshwater safeguards, it was up to local counties to step in and pass their own emergency ordinances to prevent massive environmental damage.
Without a uniform federal baseline, the wetlands of the southern seaboard are increasingly dependent on whether individual states choose pro-industry deregulation—or whether local municipalities force conservation measures of their own. You can see what individual Southern states are doing here.
Family, history, and mysticism are built into the ether of the South. Our land is part of us, and our wetlands protect us and all the creatures that are important in our ecosystem—human or not.
Back to Harper Lee:
“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. 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 frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There’s no hurry, for there’s nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.”
It’s summertime in the South, and the livin’ is hot as hell…but magic is in our air.
Oh, and clouds of mosquitos….
***
HERE’S YOUR ASSIGNMENT and your own poignant Southern summer movie list to reconnect to yourself, your ancestors, and to the rhythm of life: To Kill a Mockingbird, Big Fish, The Man in The Moon, Fried Green Tomatoes, Wild Hearts Can’t be Broken, Eve’s Bayou, The Secret Life of Bees, The Trip to Bountiful, Places in the Heart, In The Electric Mist.
Thank you for reading From the Inside Out.
If this piece brought back a summer memory of your own—the heat, the water, the food, the people, the places that made you—please consider sharing it with someone who understands what it means to love a place that is beautiful, complicated, endangered, and still full of magic.
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There’s more to come.
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