"Summertime and the living is easy."

“I Am Shaken With Gladness”

“I am shaken with gladness;

My limbs tremble with joy;

My heart and the earth

Tremble with happiness;

The ecstasy of life

Is abroad in the world.

                                  Helen Keller (1880-1968)

         It’s summer, y’all.  Summer in Birmingham is a prelude to hell.  It gives you a little taste of what is in store for you if you don’t mend your ways.  Yesterday the temperature, on the first day of June, was ninety-eight and the heat index much higher.  My dogs and I rose early so we could walk before the pavement would fry our feet.  I swore last winter, when it was seventeen degrees that I would never again complain about summer heat, but here I am. 

         The truth is, I love the changing seasons, but I’m always ready for the next one.  The only place I’ve lived where the seasons didn’t change was Florida.  When the heat became unbearable there, we would go to a nearby lake, sit up to our necks in the water and stare back at the alligator eyes, staring at us.  Nobody had the energy to strike.  The small lizards that lived on our screen porch danced their cooling-off dance with red, out-furled necks while we drank vats of sangria and sweated.

         Summer always reminds me of Mama’s garden.  It was huge.  Her blonde Cocker Spaniel, Lizzie, would go into the garden, pull an ear of corn off the stalk, shuck it and eat it on the spot.  When we visited in the summer, Mother and Mama would spend all day canning beans and tomatoes and corn while I lay in the top of a Mimosa tree, fragrant pink puffs all around, day-dreaming.  Mama cooked big southern meals of vegetables and fried chicken and made pones of cornbread in a skillet on the top of the stove.  She cooked it in bacon grease, crisp and brown on one side, then flipped it in the air and cooked the other.  Mama had a love of life that came from living close to the earth.  Her house seemed always filled with the scent of Cotillion and the songs of the mockingbird.

                                  In gratitude,

                                  Jane