Tessie D

It’s the beginning of August. It’s been more than a year now.

I hate this month. It used to not be too bad because we’d be busy getting ready for back to school, but this year, I don’t have anything like that to look forward to. So, I’ll just be counting down the days until the end of this God forsaken month. And every year, when September rolls around, Momma will always say, “Thank God that’s over. A whole ‘nother year before it’s August, again.” 

It’s not that it’s just hot here in August. The sun is also extra bright so that when you walk outside, the brightness is blinding. It’s so bright that your pupils will close up and you have to squint to see. Your eyes  water and you get tunnel vision. Then when you get in the car, the windshield is like a giant magnifying glass, heating us up like the ants on the front seat. The clouds evaporate in the sky so there’s never a drop of rain or a moment of respite from the searing heat. The grass turns brown, splinters, and evaporates into dust. The dirt roads, haze of dust over everything — furniture, mirrors. It blows in through any open windows or doors, and we have to keep the windows open in the mornings, before it gets too hot, because we can’t afford to keep the air conditioning running all the time. Our house isn’t like the ones built before air conditioning with their big screened in porches and large, high windows. Our windows are small boxes, one for each room, randomly around the house so that there’s no way for a breeze to blow through and cool down the rooms. The walls are thin anyways so you can feel the heat through the wall. Every room has a ceiling fan that runs night and day, trying to recreate some sort of breeze. Leave windows and doors open at night to help cool off the house while not having to run the air conditioning, since we can’t not run it during the hottest part of the day. 

The air conditioning went out one summer. We didn’t have the money to fix it. Laid on the beds under the ceiling fans all day. We had a cheap snow cone machine that Momma found at a garage sale a few summers back—it wasn’t much more than a cheap blender that we fed ice cubes into the top with the blades rotated to the side so that shaved ice would fall out into our plastic cups that we mixed with cherry and grape Kool-Aid that stained our lips and tongues.   

The heat is oppressive. The sun is too bright for the mid-day sky. The days are quiet — the dogs hiding from the heat, spread across patches of dirt in shade. Cattle sleeping in the thicket of trees in the shade. Mice, rabbits, and snakes burrowing into dew-damp leaves and cool mounds of dirt. Tractors silent in the barn since their presence in the pasture could start a fire from the friction of metal, heat, and dried grass. 

But each day also brings a reminder of the beauty that comes from renewal. The sun sets, and the sky fades from light blue to cotton candy pink. The cacadas and crickets. The stillness is an exhale that brings the relief from the heat and the promise of a quiet night. The cloudless, oppressively hot day also means a cloudless, star-filled night. An opportunity to gaze upon the universe and all its glory. To observe universes millions of miles away, to count constellations, to gaze back at the moon.  

The sun will bake the grasses and the heat will evaporate every ounce of moisture in the soil until large cracks open up as the clay ground pulls apart from itself. But, eventually, September will come. The tractors will be back in the fields — opening up the lanes the grow wider with each pass—cutting, raking, and baling of the hay just in time for the winter months ahead. The coolness of the day and the rumble of the machines will rouse the mice and rabbits and snakes, who will emerge from their dens and wander through the fields, only to be run over and ground into the clay dirt under the weight of the tractor tire. The cattle will return from the back pasture, herded into corrals, and loaded into trailers where they will be sold at auction when the prices are better, and slaughtered for meatloaf on Monday and pot roast on Sunday. 

Summers in Texas remind us every year that Mother Nature is unmoved by our discomfort. She tortures us with unrelenting and oppressive heat in the summer. She tease us with relief in the fall. The heat does not wain because we are hot, and the months do not speed up because we are sweltering. 

But, the fall will come. We will get through August, the worst of Mother Nature’s wrath and emerge from our resting places. Only to find that some of us won’t make it through the fall when the hand of God crushes us under the weight of a truck tire that grounds our flesh and bones into the unrelenting concrete highways beneath us. Mother Nature and God are uninterested in our morality and the unfairness of living and dying.