We are a couple of days into July, yet the heat and the humidity are already trying to kill me. Technically, Summer is only a week or so old, but the reality is this one is shaping up to be one of the hottest Summer on record. I remember a time when September offered some relief but now that month has become August 2.0. October begins warm, but at least the days are shorter, but even that brings its own misery.

With leaves falling not because of cooler weather but the lack of sunlight, October has a unique talent for radiation poisoning late in the day. We started noticing this years ago, but now the heat is making it worse. Temperatures are not going down in the autumn of the year, and even Thanksgiving and Christmas have become accustomed to eighty-degree heat.

Tropical Storm Arthur formed briefly in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico and brought a lot of rain, five inches in two days for South Georgia, and yes, we needed it, but that seems to be a trend in the last few years; wet storms coming out of the Gulf of Mexico bringing a lot of rain all at once. A pattern is forming, lots of hot dry weeks followed by a flood, followed by drought.

Of course, it’s not very smart to extrapolate climate from a few years of weather, but a trend seems to be forming. This is not the world I grew up in.

In 1998, the temperature hit one hundred and five and an asphalt crew mutinied. All of them quit at one time, and their supervisor vowed to fire all of them. I was out there with them and had a nineteen-year-old guy they just hired to be out there with me. He quit. They allowed him to come back but he never worked with me again.

I remember the next day, which was Saturday, I was cooked. I stayed inside all day and drank beer. I had never been so exhausted in my life. I also stopped daring the heat to kill me.

The woods, which for twenty-five years have been clear of underbrush now is crowded with fast growing weeds. Dog fennel, beauty berries, and a host of other plants I’ve never seen around here have exploded from the now fertile and suddenly unshaded woods. I lost dozens of trees in the floods and the hurricanes, and some are still toppling over.

Now, however, the big thing is heat.

I can mow, and I’m using a push mower because gas is $3.60 a gallon, and before nine in the morning it’s not hellish. It’s light enough to see by about seven. I have two hours a day to do what I can before the heat gets to the point I know it’s going to drag me down more than the actual work.

At 65, I can still function in this environment and do well, but I wonder what this will be like in five years.

Take Care,

Mike

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