Talking Southern No. 91 : Hot enough for you?

    It’s September 3, and it’s been awfully hot lately.  If this September is like most we’ve seen before, some of our hottest weather is still to come, a lesson your compiler learned from many September Saturdays spent sitting in the stands at Sanford Stadium in Athens cheering on his Bulldogs. 

    Recent temperatures got him to thinking of ways he has heard  over the years for expressing the level and intensity of the heat.  He believes most, if not all, of them are Southern in origin.

    “It’s hot enough to roast a possum,” your compiler’s great-aunt Helen used to say, sitting in a rocker on her front porch in Brooks, waving to every car that went by. 

     “By this afternoon, tempers and temperatures are both gonna be hotter than a three-dollar pistol,” observed State Patrolman J. C. Otwell (1920-1998), anticipating a key portion of testimony in the John Wallace “burned bones” trial in Newnan during the summer of 1948.  (Apparently even in 1948, a pistol one could buy for only three dollars was almost certainly of questionable provenance.)

     “Hot as blue blazes” is heard from time to time, and apparently refers to the blue flame that is common with gas grills and stoves.

     “Hot as hell’s hinges,” is a favorite of your compiler’s, for while he hopes he never winds up anywhere close to Hades, he would not want to touch any metal, such as hinges, he might encounter there.

      “It’s hot as a mule’s a$$ in a pepper patch,” your compiler has heard said when only menfolks are around.    Sometimes we humans eat things that are really too hot for us – very hot salsa from any source and Rooster Pepper sausage from Haralson come to mind — and end up in similar shape to the mule.

      “It’s hot enough to raise a blister on a washpot,” is another favorite of your compiler’s – it’s vividness and impossible nature make it intriguing to him.

     “It’s so hot the chickens are laying boiled eggs,” one might hear in a rural setting.

     “I feel like I’m in a deep fat fryer,” your compiler heard someone say one time.

     So what did/do Southerners do to get relief from the heat?  In pre-air conditioning days, one was quite limited.    

• Your compiler remembers an old lady in Brooks who once told him her father used to go to bed with a small bowl of water on his nightstand.  If he woke up hot, he would dip his hand in that briefly, and in his mind it helped take the edge off the heat.

• Your compiler’s late father-in-law told him about a character named “Foggy” who lived in his hometown in upstate South Carolina.  Foggy ran a dive called the Rinky Dink Club, which was located along a local river, where folks would go for heavy drinking and partying. But Foggy was a brick or two shy of a full load, and when he’d get hot, he was liable to strip off all his clothes, drag a rocking chair down into the river, and cool himself in the water.  That must have been a sight folks prayed they never saw, for Foggy weighed about nine pounds more than a Ford truck, and his shifting and jiggling flesh, even when fully encased in his habitual loose-fitting clothing, reportedly looked like a couple of possums fighting in laundry sack.

• The chapel of Fayetteville First United Methodist Church, which was the congregation’s sanctuary from 1937 till 1987, is your compiler’s favorite church building anywhere.   He thinks it is gorgeous, and it means much to him because his parents were married there in 1961, and his great-grandmother, grandmother, and both parents were all buried from there.  But he brings it up in this column because it still has vintage electric fans mounted along the walls to keep parishioners reasonably comfortable back in open window days.

    Even those of us who remember the days before air conditioning was basically ubiquitous have a hard time remembering how very hard it was to keep cool back in the day.  But, thank the good Lord, we have air conditioning today, so crank that sucker down till it blows snowballs, and let’s keep our places cool!