Clever Magazine, Fall, '06 " Southern Breeze " (www.clevermag.com)

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Southern Breeze

by Wayne Scheer

Contrary to romance novels, there's nothing sultry about summers in the South. It's just plain hot. Hot and humid. So humid you don't fry an egg on the road, you poach it. So humid songbirds don't sing, they plead. So humid…well, you get the picture. I was thinking about this while sitting at my computer trying to write a piece about summer in the South.

But I had nothing other than a decent opening sentence about the so-called sultry Southern summers. Besides, it's autumn now. The air is crisp and clean, and summer memories fade like hydrangea in the fall. Still, I can hear myself whine about the heat like a puppy taken from its mother too soon.

So why do I live here in Atlanta? The answer to that is easy. My wife has a good job and is a few years from joining me in retirement. But that really begs the question: why have I lived here for the past twenty-five years while complaining each summer as predictably as the Braves disappointing their fans in the post season? I've lived in the East and the Midwest, the Southwest and the Deep South. I've lived in small towns and big cities and suburban communities. But wherever I lived previously, I always intended to move. Until I came here to Atlanta.

Weather made me move before. I remember walking out of a movie theatre in Iowa, early in September, and seeing the first snowflakes of winter drifting through the air like the remnants of a celestial pillow fight. Instead of appreciating the beauty of the scene I got mad, realizing I'd have to deal with gray slush and sand dune-like drifts plopped along side my garage until April. And I knew as soon as I started getting angry at the weather it was time to go.

I had that same realization as a youngster shoveling snow in front of our apartment house in Brooklyn. Although our landlord paid me sometimes as much as a dollar for my effort, I vowed to someday move where it didn't snow.

But it's not just snow that disturbs me. The dryness of Arizona made me want to get down on my knees and praise God for air conditioning. When I lived there, the natives used say without a touch of irony, "But it's beautiful before 10:00 AM." And then they'd brag about the dry heat. I remember walking from my front door to the mailbox in the afternoon feeling like one of those cartoon characters crawling through the desert, never quite sure if the mailbox was real or a mirage. My next-door neighbor used to carry a canteen with him on his daily trek to fetch the bills and credit card ads.

I don't even want to think about the sandstorms in Texas and the golf ball-size hail that greeted my wife and me when we arrived in Austin in August.

And then there was beautiful Baton Rouge, Louisiana--sub-tropical foliage, orange and red crotons as large as an LSU fullback. But the air was so thick and moist and filled with pollen, as well as pollution from nearby oil fields and paper mills, I found myself changing my clothes more often than a runway model. I lived less than a mile from where I worked and I'd walk home fantasizing stripping as soon as I got home, wringing out my clothes, and standing naked in front of the window air conditioner. The two women living next door and I became fast friends, but that's for another story.

That led me to Atlanta. Having just come from "sultry" Southern Louisiana, I thought I'd died and gone to a mild climate, where it rarely got below freezing or much above 90, where the summer heat was almost always relieved by a late afternoon shower, and where you had to drive a couple hours to the mountains to see snow. My wife and I bought a house with a screened-in front porch, thus protecting us from Atlanta's mosquito population, while allowing us the fabled Southern breeze. Beer tastes especially good on a porch, as does scotch on the rocks, lemon vodka with a twist of lime and margaritas of all kinds.

And we had an old-fashioned, rural Southern lady living next to us. The kind of woman who'd shout, "Whoo-ee," for no apparent reason and who'd say things like, "This chicken is so good it makes me want to jump up and slap my momma for not fixing it when I was a young'in," often abbreviated to "Whoo-ee, this here chicken is slap-yo- momma tasty."

Miss Alma was a great character. I swear she stepped out of the pages of a forgotten Faulkner novel. She'd work her garden in a wide-brimmed straw hat and she'd chase squirrels from her tomatoes with a rake. She taught my son to play dominoes and later upped the ante to include poker for pennies, taking delight when she'd beat him out of twelve cents that came from a jar she kept on her kitchen counter.

She'd bake us sugar cookies and sweet potato pie. One time, she burnt some of the cookies and, because my mother raised me right, I told her I liked them that way. For months after that, she'd make a batch of cookies and burn some just for me. When I finally broke down and told her I was just being polite when I said I enjoyed burnt cookies, she said, "I know that. I was just waitin' to see how long it would take for you to be truthful."

She was, as they say down here, a woman of a certain age, although she more bluntly described herself as "two years older than dirt." This past spring she informed me she wasn't going to plant a garden. I told her I'd be glad to till her soil and get her crops in. She squinted at me and said, "You too old to keep two gardens." Miss Alma passed less than a month later.

So, as I sit at my computer wondering why I've made a home in Atlanta despite the summer heat, I realize it's the people I've met and the alcohol I've consumed, not necessarily in that order. I also realize I still don't have a story about the summer heat, but as Miss Alma used to say as she rocked back and forth on her porch, referring to pretty much anything that upset me, from politics to the weather: "It don't matter none. Just set a spell and let yo' mind catch a breeze."