Ethyl Remembers: Thick Summer Days.

It's July in Memphis.  Right in the middle of the summer heat.  Someone I know, yesterday described the day as a thick Southern summer day and I couldn't help thinking what an apt description that was.  Soupy, sticky, wet, summer day.  The kind of day when if you walk outside your air conditioned abode for five minutes you feel like you need to go back inside and take a cool shower. 
Over the years those of us who live below the Mason Dixie line and would not have it any other way, have indeed grown soft when it comes to the summer heat down here.  We have come in out of the fields to work in air conditioned offices and in the process lost our ability to cope with summers in the Mid South.
Down here we have an expression 'the dog days of summer'.  I wondered exactly what that was referring to, so I looked it up.  I was surprised to find it was an expression the Romans used to refer to the astrological sign of the dog star, Sirius.  Those days occurred between July and September and they were thought to be unlucky, marked by hot miserable days of doom and gloom.  I like my explanation much better.  You know the one about the days when it's so hot and miserable even the old hound dogs refuse to come out from under the front porch.  When they find the greatest amount of shade any place has to offer and they lie as still as possible and pant unceasingly with their tongues hanging down like wet dish rags.   Those are days when, if the front porch fell in, it would probably be the unhappy demise of at least three or four of the family's dogs.
When I was growing up in rural Tishomingo county in the fifties and sixties, we took such days in stride.  We kept working in our gardens and fields, because that is what we did in those days.  If we went somewhere on the weekends in our automobiles, we rolled down the windows.   Air conditioning was unheard of for the most part, in either our cars or our houses.  We had fans that blew the hot air from one side of the room to the other, but that was it.  And we could cope much better than we can today.  We continued to work and to play unless it just got so hot it was dangerous to do so.
I remember I used to like the summers, even enjoy them for the most part.  We were out of school for at least three months, not six or seven weeks like today.  We had outdoor things to do that were fun, and we didn't usually let the heat stop us from doing them.  What wimps we have all become!  Most of us would come pretty close to dying if we tried that today. 
Nice memories of those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.  Nice to think about and recall.  But as for me, I shall not venture very far from my air conditioned den today.  I shall sit and write where it is cool and be extremely thankful that those days are only a distant memory.