As I sit here comfortably in my air-conditioned house in a small town that is carved out of northern Fort Worth, it is a blazing 110 degrees outside. It will not get below 95 degrees overnight. It doesn't cool off this time of year. I've lived in DFW for a little over 3 years now and I can tell you that this temperature is not strange, it is normal for August.
In the first 2 years that I lived in DFW, I thought I had died and gone to hell. Texans justify it by saying, "But it's a dry heat." I lived in Atlanta and Houston and it's so humid that when it gets hot it feels like you're wearing a wet fur coat so I can distinguish between dry heat and humid heat. In my opinion, when it gets up toward 100 degrees, it's hot, and hot is hot!
This time of year we run from one air conditioning location to another. From the house to the car to the store to the car and back home again. If parents want to have a children's birthday party outside they plan it for early in the morning and prayerfully there is a pool or some sort of water activity involved.
Those big ole Stanley cups that people are now starting to make fun of, yeah, it's not a joke here, it's a necessity. Staying hydrated is treated like a second job.
When we started gardening in Texas, we heard that at the end of the season, tomatoes would literally boil on the vine. My granddaughter picked a handful of cherry tomatoes last night and it's true, they were cooked on the vine.
The black grackles that loiter in every parking lot around here start to look raggedy and worn out this time of year. They spend their time hopping from one speck of shade to another hoping to get a sip of water from a puddle of condensation from a car's air-conditioner before it evaporates. They pant and squawk and generally look like they're on their last leg.
Yes, I am complaining. Not as much as I have over the last 2 years, so that's something. I think I am coming to terms with where I am.
Right now, my desk chair is literally sitting on the Great Plains of the United States. If I close my eyes to the never-ending sea of brown roofs of the surrounding subdivisions, I can almost imagine seeing the wind cut a path across an endless panorama of prairie grasses dotted with sun-bleached bison skulls.
I have fought and I have lost and I have sadly given up on pointlessly trying to turn my stamp-sized backyard into the Eastern Temperate Forest of Georgia and just let it go back to the prairie. I will never have the tropical beauty of where we lived in South Florida or even the hint of rainforest that we had in Houston. The Texas Plains are stronger than me.
However, I will occasionally come across a fossilized sea shell or ammonite and feel a shiver of awe at touching something so old and I find myself honored to be in this spot on the floor of an ancient ocean.
I always remind myself that Texas is younger than the eastern states. It was founded by people escaping the over-industrialized, crowded cities of the Atlantic Seaboard (or possibly their own sin, law-breaking, and bad choices). Even though Texas is now dotted with the same overcrowded industrialized cities, the space between large cities still retains the skeletons of small towns. Shop facades tipping the hat to the Alamo are in every little town. Feed and seed stores are still in operation. Every old town sprouted by the railroad track and most often the trains still run there even though the town is boarded up, wind-blown, and dusty. Then you'll come across a subdivision that is trying too hard. Trying to create an oasis from the desert. It, too, seems to be teetering on the edge of survival. Just outside their carefully manicured lawns, on the other side of the privacy fence copperheads, and prickly pears are just waiting to take over.
It is not in my heart to say that I find Texas beautiful. To be honest, I haven't seen all of it yet. I haven't been down to the Hill Country or far west but everything I've seen so far seems to not come from fertile beauty but from desperate survival. Everything is grasping for its own space, water, and shade. Even man-made beauty such as buildings, gardens, and employment seems to be teetering on a fine line between just barely making it and dying. Sometimes I feel like Temple Grandin from the movie based on her life when she steps out of the plane and so affected by the heat, shouts, "Do people live here?"
I suppose, however, that's the point. People leaving the East and coming West wanted to be left alone. So, what I witness in natural Texas is what people have left alone. And left to its own devices, Texas is a harsh, desperate, hardscrabble kind of place. Texas leaves it up to you to decide if it's beautiful or not. It doesn't flaunt its beauty in your face but gives you flirtatious flashes of a smile in its wildflowers or canyons.
So, while I can't say Texas is beautiful, I can tip my hat to its strength, persistence, and endurance.
Texas and I respectfully nod to one another, but we aren't looking for a relationship.
