Get ready for a few months in the Southern summer broiler

Now that we’re in the summer months, the humid heat of the South rules our days. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says the heat is part of what shaped us.

As of last Friday, it’s now officially summer. Which means that for the next three months, the Carolina oven is set to broil.

People in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas like to brag about their heat. But out there it’s more like somebody blowing a hair dryer in your face. Annoying, but you can take it. Here, when it gets above 90, it’s like somebody locked you in a sauna that never shuts off.

There’s not enough Gatorade in the world to replenish your fluids if you have to spend the day outside in a Southern summer. We had a big garden when I was growing up, and part of my job was to harvest the okra when it came in. Okra grows so fast you have to cut it every day, and the variety we grew was covered in little spines that itched like fiberglass. So I’d be out there in the heat wearing gloves and long sleeves, cussing that okra up and down the rows. When I got done, I’d just wash myself down with the garden hose. But I’d have to let the hose run for a little bit first, because it had been out in the sun, too, and that first shot of water would be scalding.

People from other parts of the country wonder why we cook down our vegetables so much, why our greens and squash and lima beans turn out so soft and luscious. We are only doing to those vegetables what the sun has been doing to us.

I often think that air conditioning saved the South. Students of North Carolina history know that Stuart Cramer, who owned dozens of cotton mills in Charlotte and around the South, coined the term “air conditioning” and had some of the early patents for AC devices around the turn of the 20th century. He also named the town of Cramerton after himself. Modesty was apparently not an issue for old Stuart.

But cooling down those cotton mills made them more tolerable places to work, and when AC units eventually arrived in houses, they made the South a more tolerable place to live. Otherwise, we might have all moved up to Michigan by now.

I do think at least some of the stereotypes of the South are due to our particular type of heat. There is a special type of orneriness that falls upon a soul who has been braising outside all day, funky with sweat, surrounded by a force field of gnats, with the only shade in sight an oak tree guarded by fire ants.

And there is a special eccentricity that tends to emerge when it’s too hot to stash your weird uncle in the attic, so you have to put him out on the porch where he gets to talk to people.

Now that we can retreat to our climate-controlled houses and cars, you don’t have to be quite as tough to survive a Southern summer. But the past isn’t far away. Just step outside until you start to sweat. This time of year, it won’t take long.