Not about Snow

I remember staying so hot in the South Texas summers (in the days when even new houses didn't have central air conditioning and my mother used to come into my bedroom in the middle of the night and adjust my room air conditioner so that I woke up from the heat) that I wished with all my strength to live in the freezing cold, just to escape from the sweat and the burned, peeling skin and the asphalt too hot to stand on.

I remember that in most years the summer weather lasted for at least seven months. The end of school in the spring, the summer season, and then the start of the next school year were all hot -- in the 90's, mostly. The summer didn't end even by my birthday in late October. We never had to worry about covering up our Halloween costumes with coats or scarves. My home town was in the national news more than once on Christmas Day as the place with the highest temperature in the country.

I remember being hottest as a teenager. I remember how desperate we would be to find a place to swim during the long afternoons; how gaggles of girls would travel by Chevrolet Impala to the local drive-ins for iced mugs of root beer; how the heat made us respectable girls giddy, willing to run down the street after a trio of boys in a Jeep just to say hi; how the heat made the cool interior of any air-conditioned store or restaurant into a sanctuary from its implacable presence. The town's one movie theater offered everything we could wish for -- cool darkness, entertainment removed from our small-town universe, Milk Duds, Jordan almonds, and boys who would put one arm around you in the dark.

I remember getting into arguments with my parents just because I was so hot. Most of the arguments were about boys, though, so maybe I have mixed up the heat of the summer with the heat of adolescence. I remember reading novels in my bedroom the whole of a summer afternoon, with the door closed, the blinds drawn, and the air conditioner turned to High, living for a few hours in another, better, pastel world, not quite as real as the movie world, but real enough.

I remember that on Friday nights I would drive with my mother to the other side of town, to the restaurant where they served real hand-made tamales, enchiladas, frijoles, tacos, and pecan pralines, with big glasses of iced tea (no beer for us). It would be cold inside and the hot sun would go down beyond the big plate glass windows and we would talk as friends.