According to Dante’s Inferno, there are nine levels of hell. I’m here to tell you that Dante was wrong; there are actually ten levels. The tenth level is August in the state of Georgia. True, here in the South we don’t have four seasons, we have two-ish. But August… August is special.
August is the month in which we need gills. We open the door and step outside only to hit a wall of air so thick it’s hard to breath. And no, you never get used to it. I’ve lived in Georgia my entire life, which is rapidly approaching sixty (!) years and August always sucks. It’s easy to check the temperature and think “Hey, it’s only 79F this morning!” However, when the humidity level is over 90%, even 79 degrees is miserable. When the humidity level is high, sweat doesn’t even have its normal cooling effect because it doesn’t evaporate. Now that my part-time job has me working outside most days, I wear a long-sleeved shirt to help prevent sunburn. (The shirt is in addition to sunscreen. Fair skin is no joke.) Yes, the shirt is light-weight and a wicking material. It doesn’t matter. Wearing long-sleeves in the summer is the pits. When I get home at the end of the day, every stitch of clothing is soaking wet.
Kenn has a new coworker this summer. He asked her a couple of months ago if she was prepared for a Georgia summer. She responded “Oh, yeah. I’m from Washington state. It gets hot there too.” Little did she know… By July, I think she was beginning to re-think her life choices. “OMG! Is it always like this in the summer?” To which the answer is a cheery “Yes, but its just getting started. Just wait until August.” A dry heat really is different. (Cue Hudson from Aliens.)
If you need me, I’ll be over here counting the days until September when the weather begins to change and the hope of cooler temperatures keeps me going.
What is your least favorite season and why?
Linda Lou's Life 
I have always preferred fall and spring, but Mississippi has introduced me to year-round humidity. True, it is worse in the summer, but the humid season lasts all year long from my perspective. Coming from a part of Texas where you could leave a cardboard box of papers in the pasture and it would be just fine in a couple of years, I have shoes that fall apart in my closet in Mississippi. I did get a chuckle out of Hell’s Front Porch.
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My youngest son’s ex was from Iowa. She swore that 30 degrees here felt colder than 30 degrees in Iowa due to the humidity. Side note: the worst humidity I have encountered is in Louisiana. That whole state is just on another level humidity-wise.🥵
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“Hell’s front porch” LMAO. So true. I’ve lived in “The Valley” outside Los Angeles in the summer. I’ve lived in Miami in the summer. I’ve even been in Vegas when it’s 110+ in the summer and car tires are melting.
The worst place in the world? Summer in Washington, D.C. At 90-100+ degrees and 98% humidity. DC was built over a swamp. The air doesn’t move. And if you move, you are instantly covered in sweat and you will never stop sweating. I remember taking cold shower and not drying off and crawling into bed soaking wet to try and get cool enough to fall asleep.
It’s like that from DC throughout the southeast, all the way to the Mississippi River. Hideous.
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Amen! There are days when I shower and shortly after I dry off, my skin is wet again. Even the A/C in the house isn’t enough to overcome the frickin’ humidity.
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I hear ‘ya and agree with you. August is my most hated month and I’m farther north than you BUT it’s the same hot + humid + hazy with ragweed, which I’m allergic too, of course. Plus I wear oodles of sunscreen and it melts into my eyes so I’m half blind when I do step outside. The whole month is 31 days of aggravation.
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I feel you. This is the worst time of year for my allergies as well; the grass pollens are a killer for me. Sunscreen in the eyes in the worst, LOL.
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Hilarious!! Do you have mosquitoes, too?? Because that would make it extra bad… I’m a couple hours north of Memphis and this summer’s weather has been nutso. We had like a solid month of 100+ with zero rain. Now, for 2 weeks, it’s been raining 2 INCHES at a time!! Brown grass to a foot high in days. Too wet to mow. Ha ha. And, the humidity! It’s like a sauna. I feel for you in a long sleeve shirt!
I like all the seasons, but somebody else can have Februarys here!! The past two Februarys have been an absolute deep freeze. Temps 20 degrees and below for weeks… ewww!
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Yes, we have mosquitoes! Fortunately, they aren’t as bad at our current house as they were at our last one. I rarely ventured outside at our old house because of the mosquitoes. Our weather has been the opposite. For weeks we got drenching rains daily, now we get next to nothing. We live just south of the “fall line” in Georgia so when places north of us are getting snow, we get nothing. Winter here last year was negligible.
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Thank goodness the mosquitoes are better where you are now. I understand- we’ve been in places where it seemed like the mosquitoes were waiting for us to just open a door… there definitely are some interesting insects in the world. Ha ha. Guess that’s a blessing in winter, unless you like snow. I like snow, but we barely get any. We mostly get ice.
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