I was born in August in California’s Sacramento Valley, where summer days often reach 95-105 degrees and sometimes more. When I was a kid we didn’t have air conditioning, just swamp coolers that didn’t cool a home as much as it piled humidity onto your plate of misery. That wasn’t a huge problem for me as a child. Kids, especially boys, are like dogs. They have no sense about comfort. They can come home filthy, dripping sweat and bleeding from the nose and knees with a big, dumb grin on their faces.
As I got older the heat started to bother me, even after we got air conditioning. Humidity wasn’t a huge problem in Northern California but I spent one insufferably humid summer living in Memphis where walking ten steps from your air conditioned home to your air conditioned car would render the cool, refreshing shower you just took a pointless waste of time and cool water.
The summer I spent in Chicago was even worse. I didn’t have a car and had to make my way around the city on buses and trains. Chicago starts with heat and stifling humidity, adds mosquitoes the size of blackbirds and sets it all to the loud, otherworldly buzzing soundtrack of cicadas, giving the whole experience a distinctive horror film effect.
Now I live in Texas.
I know summer weather is more temperate here in Dallas than it is farther south, closer to the steamy Gulf, or west toward the baked lizard lands of Big Bend Country, and I appreciate that, I really do.
Still, summers are oppressive and depressive to me. Even though we are still bailing out flood water, barely emerging from a record spell of cool weather and spring rains, I dread the coming months.
Crazy, isn’t it, how much the weather affects our moods? I’m old enough to know it shouldn’t. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time looking for explanations, if not relief. I’ve read many psychological dissertations that dissect and inspect our moods in search of a unifying theory on the topic and all I’ve read have reached the same conclusion: some people like hot, sunny weather and others, like me, prefer the opposite.
Go figure.
Dave Williams
