For the past several nights we’ve been running photos of people’s baked yards. I have to hand it to our viewers… you all have gotten pretty creative. One of the pictures we received shows a woman mowing her pond, which has long since dried out from the heat.
My other favorite is a picture of a horse in Clarksville who took a roll in the pasture and stood up to find himself in a cloud of dust. These pictures are not only funny, but they do a great job of illustrating just how dry it’s been. (Here are two more pictures of the horse. Picture 2, Picture 3 )
As we face several more days of record heat… I started to think back to my own hottest summer. I can’t tell you the year or even the temperature, but the experience itself is something that I’ll never forget.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of summers at my grandparents’ house in Double Springs which is about ten minutes west of Cookeville. Back then, this was an area of Tennessee we referred to simply as “the country.”
When I was about seven or eight… a heat wave swept through the area, and though my grandparents house was quaint enough… the one thing it didn’t have was AIR CONDITIONING.
My grandmother was tough as nails but a little old fashioned. Much as this city slicker begged for something as simple a window unit… all she had in place were these enormous box fans which seemed to only circulate the hot air throughout the house like a massive convection oven.
In fact, come to think of it, the fans were a hazard in their own right.
The slats were so far apart and the blade so sharp they could have taken off a small child’s hand in a single swipe. Death trap or not… I can still remember standing two inches away from that fan singing to hear my own voice and marveling over just how far that thing could blow a single strand of hair. The only thing my grandparents owned that did have air conditioning was their car.
Sometimes in the heat of the afternoon we would load up in that Chevy Nova and drive up and down the street just to enjoy the cool breeze.
That same summer there was a convenience store that opened up down the street called Echo Valley Market. If I’m not mistaken it’s still there. For the market’s Grand Opening, they gave away free samples of a new drink Coke had just launched called… Mellow Yellow.
When my grandmother and I weren’t cruising up and down the highway trying to stay cool, we were camped out in that store sipping free soft drinks in the aisles and lamenting about how hot it was.
As I started writing this, it dawned on me that there aren’t many things from my childhood that I remember so vividly as that summer, and now that I think back on it… they are some pretty good memories.
In that spirit, I hope you’ll all take a moment to try to make some fun memories of your own during this blazing hot weather. Last night my family and I traded our air conditioned living room for a trip to a local carnival camped out near our house.
As the scrambler tossed me and my five year-old wildly from side to side I couldn’t help but wonder if she’ll remember how hot it was or instead just think about how fun it was being together.
Send us a story about your own hot summer. We’d love to hear it!
Unanchored 