Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 1, No. 8 (July 4, 1998)

Almost anywhere you live in this country, you may have noticed something over the last few weeks: it's hot. That's not news to those of us who live in the South, but it has many of our Northern friends in a sweat.

I was raised in South Texas and have lived in Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia. I know dry heat, humid heat and everything in between. Like most Southerners, it is to me a fact of life as cold is to our friends in Maine. It is a uniting factor in that the great and the lowly, the powerful and the humble, the good and the bad, sweat equally. But, in the heat, there is a difference between Northerners and Southerners. Like the Eskimos with their snow, we have dozens of words and expressions to describe it.

When I lived in the North people would say of a 98 degree day, "It's hot as h---!" Now, that pretty much says it. It's a perfectly good simile and makes the point. But of a day like that, my grandmother from Virginia would say, "It feels like Hell's only a quarter-mile away and the fences are down."

While it may be as hot as h--- in Rock Island, Illinois, the same day in Hot Coffee, Mississippi would be described as "hotter'n a country boy's pistol on the Fourth of July" (pronounced Joo-lie, of course). In Tennessee it's been said that a day was so hot, the stumps on a ten-acre newly cleared field crawled to the woods for shade.

What does a day like that do to a person? In Pennsylvania someone might say, "I'm hotter than h---!". Here in Louisiana we get hotter'n a hen in a wool blanket trying to lay a goose egg. In Harlingen, Texas, a person may be hotter'n a blistered man in a pepper patch.

There's a lot of talk of the weather in the South, probably because we have so much of it—severe thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes—something else every day. Outside of Dixie it's not generally known, but Arkansas, Mississippi, parts of northern and central Louisiana and Alabama have tornado touchdowns twelve months out of the year. In fact, Mississippi leads the nation most years in deaths from tornadoes. It's the twisters in the mid-west that get the press and the movies. What is a Mississippi tornado like? Read on.

My cousin, Cletus Crane, was out fishin' last April in Low Butcher Swamp in Winston County when a twister hit. Cletus had just hook himself a catfish when that funnel came tearing along the creek bed. It took that catfish slap off his line, turned it inside out and cleaned it. Then it blew the fish through a barbed wire fence cutting it into equal portions. The wind took and rubbed those portions against a salt block, seasoning them. Next it blew them into a barrel of meal that was sitting on the porch of the Widow Eaves's place, coating them evenly with breading. A flash of lightnin' hit those pieces of catfish and fried them as nice 'n brown as you please just as the wind settled and set the whole mess down atop a blue platter on the Widow's table in time for supper. They were good eatin', too.

About the time tornado season decides to take a vacation, the Gulf starts sending hurricanes ashore. A friend of mine told me about one that hit near where he lived in Florida a few years back--'said you never seen such winds. They came so hard they blew a well right up out of the ground. They then proceeded to blow a crooked road straight and scattered the days of the week so bad that Sunday didn't get around 'til late Tuesday morning.

Mostly it's been hot and dry in the South this Spring and Summer. How hot and dry, you ask? So hot 'n dry that the catfish in the creek bed are having to swim in their own sweat. And if I'm not telling you the absolute truth in all this, may lightnin' ... but, never mind. I hear thunder off in the distance.

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