It finally happened.
And just as I was on the brink of losing my ever lovin’ mind…..or deciding to pack up a house full of junk, dogs, kids and unmatched socks and move north. (Actually, I believe these two things are mutually exclusive.)
Thankfully, my brain delivered a cease and desist order to the rest of my cranky and irritated self when I stepped out onto the porch this morning and didn’t break out into an all over body sweat.
My hair didn’t suddenly turn damp even though I had just blown it dry. Beads of salty perspiration did not form down my back, nose, or thighs the minute I locked the door behind me. I didn’t have to inhale a burst of hot, humid air right after inhaling my Cream of Wheat.
I glanced at the ladybug thermometer by the front door. Twice. I couldn’t believe my own eyes. Sure enough, the little red line miraculously and quite frankly, just in the nick of time, finally dipped down past 90. I cried out in joy. I was going to make it.
I had seen a sign early in the week but dismissed it as a hallucination due to dehydration seeing as it was noon and I was sweeping the driveway and had lost two gallons of water weight when I saw them. See, I had read somewhere that when you spot butterflies flapping around, it means fall is here. But at the time I was too busy muttering like a crazy person, mopping the sweat off my brow, and telling two yellow monarchs to get a room, when I saw them shamelessly flirting and fluttering on the hood of my car.
Obviously they can’t stand the South Georgia heat either and are happy to be foot loose and fancy free. Just like us sub-tropical living humans who have long ago given up on getting to wear the latest fall fashions of skinny jeans tucked into riding boots under chunky cable sweaters and have settled for just being able to step our flip flopped feet outside and not pour buckets after a long and sweltering summer.
A lot of people come down here to escape the harsh winters and the very real diagnosis called Seasonal Disorder. Evidently not having a view from your window because snow is covering it up does crazy things to people.
My friend Jennifer, from Jasper, Alabama spent one winter in upstate New York and high tailed it back down here to the island as soon as the ground thawed and she could pack her car without losing her fingers. Her bulldog, Bogart, however, is now in psychotherapy and on a strict diet of Prozac and exercise. I am happy to report he’s been here a year and a half is finally getting better.
One of my favorite authors, Robert Goolrick, was actually inspired by stories he found published around the early 1900’s in a small Wisconsin town paper and wrote A Reliable Wife based on his findings. Apparently, during vicious months-long, white-out, lake effect snow storms, a whole lot of people tended to act abnormally. You know, like severing their own limbs and taking out their entire family with an axe over an argument about what’s for dinner. You can’t tell me crazy doesn’t make for some really good fiction.
Just imagine the scary genius of Stephen King and would it exist if he lived in a sunny bungalow in L.A. instead of the blistering windy winters of Bangkok, Maine. Which reminds me, I was excited to find out Stephen King is writing a sequel to The Shining, out next year. Cannot wait, let me tell you.
But after reading that this novel, like 90% of all his other ones, would once again be set in a snowy New England town, I felt like he should know it doesn’t have to be winter and it doesn’t have to be up North for someone to lock themselves in their house for months, stop shaving, and start having conversations with imaginary people or, at the very least, the weather reporters on the TV. It happens at here at my house every summer.
Here’s my letter:
Dear Mr. King,
First off, let me tell you I am a HUGE fan. But not the stalker kind you are used too, I’m sure, so please don’t stop reading and send the cops to the return address. It’s just thanks to you I am deathly afraid of clowns, identical little twin girls, walk-in freezers, and anyone who closely resembles Kathy Bates or shares her last name. This is most certainly not a bad thing since I enjoyed every sleepless night and terror induced dream.
I also enjoy the detailed descriptions of your snowy New England: the howls of the relentless wind against the glass-paned windows of a creaky old Victorian, the snow banked steepness that surrounds a dark and dangerous remote mountain road, the candle-lit silence in strange rooms rendered dark by downed power lines and frozen limbs off trees. I feel closed in just by simply reading what’s written between your pages, suffocated by the frosty isolation you pull us into like a secret trap door that opens in the vast whiteness that protects your world, then shuts, leaving us secluded and alone teetering on the brink of a quiet sort of madness.
But, see Stephen, even though it’s been 35 years since Jack’s been a very bad boy and went on to become that great, big alcoholic care taker in the sky, or at least for eternity at the Overlook Hotel, doesn’t mean you can’t take his tricycle riding, scarred for life, psychic son, Danny out of your freezing New Hampshire and place him down here for a summer. There really it’s much of difference. Trust me. They’re both a different kind of hell.
See, Steve, down here people are driven to their own kind of slow boiling insanity that sneaks up on them around May like a swarm of sand gnats starved since early spring. It starts as a simmer, this unyielding heat, a tease, a tickle that gets you going outside in the morning, but then causes you around noon to make a hasty retreat back inside where you then never leave. Down here in coastal South Georgia, the extreme heat, much like your freezing winters in Maine, brings out the crazy, if you know what I mean.
I have seen normal, sweet-loving children’s heads spin with their teeth bared and finger nails clawed in. I have watched conscientious mothers take their bed, doors locked; pints of ice cream the only things they let in. I have witnessed yards over-grown, beer bottles strewn, and grown men sitting in baby pools to avoid the wife, the crushing heat, and the terrors they helped spawn without caring who sees.
There’s the creak of the ceiling fan that taunts you overnight while you try and sleep on top of the sheet. There are the bugs, the lizards, and the marsh crabs that let themselves in without knocking first to escape the scalding sun, scaring you half to death. There’s the lifeless, flat, hot air that rushes through the holes in your screens and under your doors, leaving a $600 dollar electricity bill that makes you want to let out a blood curdling scream.
See, scary stuff really does happen down here in the South, Steve, when the heat’s 110 degrees.
Just a thought.
Anyway, thanks for your time and good luck on the new book. If you need any help, you know where to find me. Actually, I will finally be outside now that my driveway isn’t giving off steam and the heels of my feet won’t burned off walking to out get the mail…(not looking for your responding correspondence, of course. Remember, I’m not that crazy.)
Talk to you soon,
Laura
I’ll let y’all know if I hear back from him. I’m not holding my breath, but at least the blustery gasp of ocean air has cooled a bit and I can safely say I have survived another hot and humid summer. Looks like fall on the island has saved my sanity once again. Bring it on.
