When did it happen? When did I become such a wuss in the heat? We never even had a window air conditioner when I was growing up. During the summer, I played outside from sunup to sundown. Did it really get warmer, or did I just get used to technology? Or did I just get old?
I mowed my lawn on Sunday. I started at 7 a.m. and there are no houses around, so I didn’t have to worry about waking anyone. And my yard is small. In fact, I use an electric mower and my 100-foot extension cord reaches all the way to the street. Hence, it only takes me an hour and a half to mow. But by the time I was finished, I felt like I was going to have a heat stroke.
I was going kayaking almost every day after my dogs finished eating around 4 p.m. Not anymore. Now I go at 5:30 in the morning, at the butt crack of dawn, because the afternoons are way too hot. I usually finish kayaking at 8:00 a.m., and even then, it’s already getting too hot to continue. It used to be that I could splash water on me if I was getting too hot, but now the water is too warm to do that.
It was just a couple of months ago when several friends said they wanted to go kayaking with me but wanted to wait until it warmed up. I said, “You know this is Alabama, right?” There is no “warming up” in Alabama. There are cold days followed by days that are too hot to leave the comfort of your home.
The worst part of my day is walking from my house to my car. Here’s an invention idea for you. An umbrella made from lightweight solar panels that blows cold air straight downward onto the person holding it. You’d be able to go to all those outdoor events, concerts, and ballgames in comfort. Heck, I’d even mount one on my kayak.
Luckily, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten wiser. When I was younger, I would do all kinds of things outdoors in the middle of summer, during droughts, and even heat waves. I got severely blistered at the June Jam every year. Once, after a softball game, I got blistered so bad it turned into water blisters. Have you seen that before? Huge bubbles full of liquid on my shoulders and back.
I’m much more careful these days. When friends call up in the summer and ask me to do something outdoors, I just laugh and say, “That’s a good one. Call me in the fall.”
Neal Wooten is a columnist in the Mountain Valley News and North Jackson Press newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected].
