In the heat of the night, and day
There are an uncountable number of Northern transplants in the Triangle who’ve been asking themselves this week how the devil they ended up living in such a godforsaken climate.
Tee-hee. I wonder if they realize summer didn’t officially get here until today. The misery’s just starting.
We’ve gotten a small break in the past 48 hours from the recent mid-90s temperature readings, but that killer combination of extreme heat and lung-clogging humidity is due to return this weekend. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems hotter nowadays than it did when I was a child growing up in the Deep South. (Somewhere, Al Gore is smiling at that last sentence.) I can’t imagine what this is like for our Northern cousins who’ve moved here recently.
Actually, I can imagine. I did a reverse migration as a young man, leaving Georgia after college and moving to Edmonton, Alberta, which is the northernmost major city on the North American continent. Edmonton is almost exactly the same latitude as Moscow. In contrast, my little patch of Georgia was the same latitude as Casablanca. It was a big deal at home when the overnight temperature got down to the 20s. My first winter in Edmonton, it hit -40 degrees. That’s right: 40 degrees below zero.
You see the problem I had.
I also subsequently lived in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Michigan, cold climates all. I never got used to the weather in any of them, and have never complained about the heat of a Southern summer ever since moving back. My first stop after returning to the South was Miami, where I lived for five years. I reveled in the climate there. The air conditioning in my car conked out shortly after I arrived, and I never got it fixed. I was probably the only person in South Florida who, by choice, drove around with no air conditioning. Even the Haitian people I worked with thought I was crazy, and they could have written the book on coping with heat.
I also never lived in an air-conditioned home until I was an adult. My mother thought air conditioning was unhealthy. Instead, we had a huge fan mounted in the ceiling of the house. In the evening, when the heat faded, the fan drew in cool air from the outside and vented it through the attic, keeping a light breeze coming into the house all night.
I still sleep in the night air. I’ve had my air conditioning on just twice so far this year, only in the upstairs where I work and only in the afternoon. Otherwise, the windows are open. In the evening, I turn on the ceiling fan and sleep under its breeze.
Sure, it’s been a little muggy recently. But it still beats 40 below.