I’m out walking.
Only the prelude to fully ripened summer, but it’s already hot and intensely humid. If this were Germany or Japan, we’d have one of those really conceptual words for it that translates to “warm pudding air.”
The sweat doesn’t slide in single delicate trails but blooms in dense wet chaos across your clothes. Even your socks grow damp as your ankles pant for air.
You could complain crossly about it, like Louisiana just keeps making mistakes every year. You could wilt inside watching TV with a fan spinning over your face. On the table: a glass filled with rapidly shrinking ice cubes. Bobbing, disintegrating life rafts.
There’s so much laundry. So much sweat. Heavy, warm pudding air.
What were you expecting? That the bayou could be an Atlantic beach with sailboats and striped tees that stay clean enough to toss on the bedroom chair and wear again the next day?
Your grandfathers and grandmothers built houses here, not there. Up there, they wear sweaters in June. They light fires in July. Summer looks like a catalog.
Lighthouses and the sharp icy ocean, but your grandmother’s green pirogue and her bones are here, buried above the ground so they don't float away.
Your sweet bright October will come. It will. But if you wait for it to go walking, half the year you’ll be looking at a TV and a spinning fan and disappearing ice cubes instead of the trees.
The sprawling trees, and the top-heavy grass, and the reckless clover, and the motionless toads hiding under warm pudding air in warm pudding ditches.
Walk outside because you’ll die anyway, and you might as well see the trees and the toads.
Listen to a song of violins while you walk. Oh, those violins. They break you open like a blackberry being bitten in half. A shock of tart pink life stains your fingers and your lips and your shirt. You’ll never get that pink life out of your shirt.
You’re alive, because you’re sweating and stained and walking.
It’s not comfort. It’s not dry and pristine clothes. It’s not sailboats and stripes. It’s sweating like a toad. It’s walking while you can.
Bread pudding air. Rum sauce sweat.
Anything can be loved if you go out to meet it.
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