It is time to sweat!

What’s new? It is summer in the city and it is mid July and it is the south and it happens every year about this time. It is time to sweat.

If you’ve gone through these summers you know it is time for slowing down. Just watch the yard critters. They will tell you.

When it gets hot, you know like really hot, like 95 degrees in the shade, the yard gets very quiet. Suppose you were running around in a fur coat, would you sit in whatever coolness you can find?

As a kid, I was prone to heatstroke. I was an urban kid who rarely went out in the summer heat. I was trained or restrained to stay in my dark room with a window fan in the heat of the season. I would sit still and watch my black and white television, drink iced tea, or take naps.

When I would go outside in the sunshine and the heat, even at the ocean with all its cool breezes and refreshing waves, I would get sunburned, eat too much, run and play too hard, and get a heat stroke.

Some say it is hypothermia or dehydration or just over exposure to weather that the body is unprepared for. All I know is that the first day at the beach I would run and play with all my cousins who lived at the beach, get sunburned, puke, and fade out under cold compresses.

Later in life, I wised up, would put on lotions, moderate my time in the sun, and wear t-shirts and hats and most important realize when I should go into the shade. The beach sun is different than the city sun. Probably because you are using water like a magnifying glass to focus the ball of fire on you’re tender covering. Another life lesson was after the first burn and peel; you will bronze and not require so much attention. It’s that top layer that has to come off.

There are all sorts of ways to stay cool in this weather, but they all require a mass amount of electricity. All my neighbors have those big noisy boxes outside their houses that whir and groin under the stress of trying to keep the interior cool. A steady stream of repair trucks and mailings fill the summer months.

So why don’t we just sweat? Well we do. It might just be a stressful situation or a heated moment, but we sweat. We should celebrate the evil leaving our bodies and just take it as a sign of summer like big flowered clothing and flip-flops.

Will have to change my t-shirt tomorrow and my sheets and my socks because the overheated fans will only keep my body temperature at a certain level. After that, I’m wet.

And all of you who are in your conditioned environments enjoy the comfort of cool, walk outside sometime and feel what the planet has to offer.

I’ve learned from my grandparents who high ceilings and heavy drapes on the floor to ceiling windows kept cool. Keep everything closed up and don’t move around a lot. Maybe not the best way to keep the air moving or remove whatever bad aromas might exist; it does keep the little humbled abode cool.

A few more days of hot and hot and even hotter weather, changing clothes and moving slow, knowing that down the line it will be cooler. Cool enough to finish my yard work. Cool enough to finish some chores.

Just stay hydrated.