I was fighting the faulty power cord to a balky air conditioner that refused to operate, sweat pouring down my face, hair in my eyes, racing a lightning-rich thunderstorm reminiscent of the wrath of an Old Testament prophet on a particularly foul batch of idol-worshipping heathens when I realized something — again.
I hate August.
Not my dear friend August, a brother in Christ who was somehow blessed with that name courtesy of an ancestor who obviously had a sense of irony. I’d give my life for that August or anyone in his family.
The month of August, however, would cheerfully take that life, given half a chance. It usually does a good job of destroying the spirit, anyway.
August is a stinking, sweaty, soppy, slimy-shoes, smelly sock of a month. It’s too hot to fish, and too hot to hunt wild pigs. The beaches are crammed full of people who complain about the crowds of people on the beaches. It is fruitless for me to hope to make it from the house to the truck without a clean shirt becoming a melted mess.
I detest August.
August has virtually no redeeming features, outside of a few birthdays. August is a drunken relative at the family reunion who hits on his own cousins. August is a pernicious, perfidious, pulchritudinous pest that persuades me to use awkwardly alliterative sentences of multisyllabic words in hopes of avoiding profanity.
August, you repulse me.
August used to mean that the summer off from school was almost over, the few fleeting months of freedom melting away like the soles on our Keds when we walked down the melting blacktop looking for something new to do. Of course, a lot of kids go to school starting in August now, which I consider to be cruel and unusual punishment, although they have air conditioning in most schools now.
August, you reek.
I like to eat; I am blessed with a metabolism and a stomach that allows me the ability to eat most anything I want, in large quantities. However, eating too much during the hellaciously humid haze of August leads to discomfort at best. So I don’t eat as much as I want to, and end up being perpetually grumpy.
August, you are a vile, vituperous, venomous, vulgar bucket of vulture-attracting things best not considered. You are five miles of bad, washed-out dirt road leading to a cemetery where the honored dead are only remembered when a crooked politician needs names in a ballot box.
August is a flat tire on a country road beside a hog farm dumpster where mutant sand spurs thrive in hundred-degree temperatures on a Sunday morning.
August is hurricanes, thunderstorms that do nothing to reduce temperatures but enthusiastically raise humidity, nights where the sky is almost apologetic in both its misery and the haze that hides the stars, and a full moon that releases far more evil and stupidity than average.
Because — August.
August is bulletproof tiger mosquitoes, ticks, mahogany wasps, the last of the horseflies, sneaky yellow jackets, swarming fire ants, angry copperheads, stinking cottonmouths, and rabid coons.
I am convinced that the real reason the Grinch hated Christmas was because he had gone through a bad August.
August is a spavined, wormy, ill-tempered, poorly bred, 20 year old ungelded mule possessed with an evil spirit that would make even the staunchest Baptist pale.
August is malevolent, murderous, malodorous, malicious, malignant mess. It does have occasional nice days, but they are just a trick, surprising you like the mold on the last donut in the box after you’ve already eaten six.
But with the end of August comes September, and a time of celebration.
Yes, there will be hurricanes and hundred-degree days and humidity, but they don’t seem as bad in September. The cornfields echo with gunfire as hunters dust off the malaise of the previous months and wait for the doves to rocket past, twisting silver-and-purple spots flashing in the sunset. Friendships and rivalries are renewed on the tailgates of pickup trucks in September.
September is when the shoals of blues, spots and Spanish begin moving offshore. A campfire on a riverbank is a cheery thing, rather than defense against mosquitoes.
September is the return of the Friday night lights and one of the only sports I care a whit about, high school football.
September is church homecomings and family reunions with new babies and newlyweds and old folks who remember when that field over there was tobacco, and everybody worked in it.
I will sweat in September, but it seems to lack the stink of the sweat of August.
September is the last of the watermelons and the first of the pears, grapes and the middle crop of apples, the earliest chinquapins and pecans, all waiting to be made into pies or sliced with a pocketknife or just plucked and eaten under the tree, with sweet juices running down your mouth.
August has the Perseid meteor shower, but September’s clear night skies are a riot of light shows large and small, as if the comets themselves are celebrating the approach of Autumn’s splendor.
Yes, September has all that and more going for it — but first, we must survive the torpor and torture of August.
