The hot days and sticky nights that Earl dreams about in the cold of January have arrived with a vengeance. Yesterday, the thermometer hit the mid-nineties, and today is equally warm. I hesitate to check in with the local weatherman regarding tomorrow.
It isn’t only the thermometer that tells me it’s hot. Neither is it the muggy feeling I have when I’m outside. It’s conversation. At the cleaners, the supermarket, the gas station, the drugstore. Everywhere I go the clerks and cashiers and other customers are all talking about the heat.
“Hot enough for ya?” “It’s a hot one out there.” “Is it still hot out there?” “Have you heard the forecast?” “I’ll have an iced frappaccino.”
It reminds me of how the late Johnny Carson had a running gag on his television show when it originated in New York City. When that city would swelter in the summer, Carson would say, “It was so hot today that . . . and he’d fill in the rest of the sentence with some absurd result of the heat. It almost always got a laugh.
Well, it’s so hot here in St. Joseph, Michigan that nobody is laughing. We are down seven inches in rainfall in the past three months. The river is becoming a stream; lawns are masses of brown scrub; flowers are trying to show off their best but having difficulty. Worst of all, the farmers who were almost drowned from rain last year are scorching from the sun this year.
So I suppose it’s no wonder that talk of the weather creeps into daily conversation, even among strangers. Like poet Jane Merchant once remarked, “We get to know each other by degrees.”
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