I have lived in several states, but most of them were comfortably located above the Mason-Dixon line. I was born in Virginia, but we moved to Pennsylvania before I turned five, and then we were in Maine by my tenth birthday. When I was 22 I moved to Illinois, and then I moved to Wisconsin for a better rate on rent, and then I moved back to Illinois when my commute made my blood pressure rise so high and so fast that I could watch my fingers swell as they gripped the steering wheel.
You may notice a pattern in my moving. None of these moves were particularly “southern” in nature and in a country full of people bitching about shoveling snow, I actually like clearing a sidewalk and don’t mind chiseling ice from a windshield. What I do mind is sweating. I mind it a lot. There is little that will irritate me more than getting out of the shower and feeling like I need another one immediately. That’s why it was shocking to my friends and family when I applied for a job in Arizona.*
I’m not sure how to explain summer in the Sonoran Desert to someone who hasn’t been here. It’s miserable. I say that as someone who has been to Virginia in August as an adult – Tempe, Arizona is worse. Yes, it’s a “dry heat,” but that doesn’t matter. Once you see numbers like 110 degrees Fahrenheit, without a heat index, hot is hot. Humidity doesn’t even matter. You don’t want to go outside. Getting into a car is a sort of punishment, and grabbing a cart from the uncovered corral is about as bright as grabbing a cookie sheet from an oven with your bare hands after 10-12 minutes of baking.
For a lot of people this is a trade off. Some people say you’re trading January for August, but I don’t think that’s true. Even in the miserable wind chill of January I went outside in Chicago. I simply put on a parka, some ear muffs, mittens, and a scarf and called it good. In Arizona your only option is to hide indoors with the thermal drapes drawn, developing a vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight. Playgrounds are empty for summer, even though kids are out of school, because touching anything metal that’s been out in the sun can result in 3rd degree burns. Pools are the temperature of bathtub water, and people actually drop blocks of ice into them to make them bearable. You can’t go outside in your bare feet without risking blisters on your feet from burning asphalt, or splinters from what was once grass.
Someday I will live in a place where there are seasons again. In the meantime I’ll be sitting in my air conditioned living room, bitching on the internet about how I want to go outside, and gloating that it is the first day of summer. From here on out the days get shorter, and eventually cooler, thank god.
*This was in part because I had purchased snow shoes, literally, 3 months earlier. Did you know you can use snowshoes on sand? You can. Actually, mine have only ever been used on sand, at the beach. It was quite the workout.