Tag: summer

Heartland

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During the wheat harvest of 1977, when Betty was thirty-two and Arnie forty-five, Betty drove every evening from her full-time job as a subpoena officer at the Sedgwick County courthouse in downtown Wichita to Arnie’s farm. She took over the house, cooking for Arnie and his field help, driving tubs of fried chicken, paper plates, and jugs of iced tea to fields where yellow dust followed red combines. She learned the blowing dirt of the country summer, when teeth turn gritty in the wind and shower water turns brown between shoulders and toes. She rode the combine with Arnie, a rite of passage for any would-be farmer’s wife, and woke up the next morning with clogged sinuses. She sweated through the harvest nights of midsummer, when fans blow hot air through hot bedrooms and sleep is possible only because of how hard you worked.

~ Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

More on this book:

Forecast: 94° F. (Feels like…Hot)

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Wiebke Rauers, a freelance illustrator from Berlin working on character designs, children’s books, and magazines. Find her on Facebook here.

This August Day

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This August day, reader, is a rose window glowing with heat.

I make you a gift of it, it is yours.

One o’clock. I am going back to the village for lunch. Strong with the silence of the pines and the chestnut trees.

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.

~ Violette LeDuc, La Bâtarde

Notes: Quote: Nemophilies. Photo: Franiuk (via Your Eyes Blaze Out). Inspired by: High today – 91° F. Lisbon: 111.2° F

Now has come, an easy time

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Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by, and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer…
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

~ William Stafford, from “Why I Am Happy” in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford by Kim Stafford 

Notes: Poem – Thank you Hammock Papers. Photo: Elena Morelli

Before Air-Conditioning*

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Later on, in the Depression thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines. Just to watch them handling thick woollen winter coats in that heat was, for me, a torture. The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished, so their lunch break was short—fifteen or twenty minutes. They brought their own food: bunches of radishes, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables.

~ Arthur Miller, Before Air-Conditioning (The New Yorker, June 22, 1998)

Notes:

  • *Inspired by temperature now in Dallas, TX: 103° F and Rising!
  • Photo: Radishes by El Oso Botas. “Madrid-based, Guatemala-born and raised, photographer, food stylist, chef and digital content creator. I’ve had a keen interest in art, colours, and shapes since I was a child.” More photographs here.