recovering economist
There are few things as cathartic as having the time and bandwidth to sit and watch it storm and rain.
Maybe staring into the flames of a late night camp fire?
Or making a cross-country car trip solo?
I have fond memories of sitting on our back porch in Panama City Florida as a child and watching the humid afternoons turn into rumbling thunderstorms.
This reminded me of that.
And I was nearly a child again for a second.
Didion is here is talking about California, so flat and so hot.
But it sounds to me exactly like Lubbock, Texas.
First of all, it’s flat. Second – yeah – it’s also hot.
I remember walking across the Texas Tech campus during grad school in July around 5:30 in the afternoon.
When the wind was just right, it felt like a hair dryer on high blowing over your entire body.
I would leave my office dignified, but by the time I got the First Baptist Church parking lot, where my car was parked, I was a mess.
I just live that line: “August comes on not like a month but like an affliction.”
It is just as hot in the summertime, so hot that the air shimmers and the grass bleaches white and the blinds stay drawn all day, so hot that August comes on not like a month but like an affliction; it is just as flat, so flat that a ranch of my family’s with a slight rise on it, perhaps a foot, was known for the hundred-some years which preceded this year as “the hill ranch.”
-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem