August

I hate August. I hate it with a passion, it's worse then January, which everyone in Iowa claims is the worst month, but, they're wrong. It's August. I pretend all year there's no August and I rip it out of all the calenders and burn it, but, it always comes anyway. The garden is dying and spewing out too much food to deal with in a last attempt to reproduce and it wouldn't matter if I watered it every night, it would still die because the sun is just too hot for any living thing but grasshopper and wasps. And every time I walk out there, the grasshoppers fly at me by the dozens, clicking and buzzing, fat from eating all my formerly pretty leaves, and all the plants look like lace where they've chewed them, and I hate those suckers. I nearly wrecked my car once because of a grasshopper. They give me the creeps. Air conditioners run relentlessly and utility companies rub their greedy hands together and laugh and wells are emptied clean dry trying to get enough water for livestock. And more water is hauled in with great tanks, sloshing all the way back from town. Car seats are too hot to sit on and steering wheels will burn you and black top roads get all melted and sticky. It's like driving through tar and it stinks. The sky turns an intense blue when you can stand to go out in it, which is usually in the early mornings or at sunset. Several people will die from the heat and it will be on the news, usually old people. The deadly heat and humidity here is something no one can understand unless they've lived in Iowa in August. It's not normal and it makes me depressed and sucks every stray bit of energy I have out. It gives me headaches, makes me throw up if I'm out in it, and makes me miserable and I mostly stay inside. In September it will still be hot, and we might get an Indian Summer that lasts through most of November, even after the first snow, but, it will NOT be like August. I HATE AUGUST!!! And now I will always associate August with the death of my FIL and I will hate it even more.

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I remember walking through the corn and sunflowers in August as a kid and running my hands over the dry brittle leaves and knowing school was coming soon, a trauma that always had to be dealt with, and painful cheap shoes would be forced back onto small brown feet after months of living barefoot. And one of the Sisters was always yelling at us to kill a grasshopper that got into the house by riding on our sunburned backs past the screen door. Time to knock down wasps nests under the eaves and run like the wind. The time when you rarely slept because of the heat and you'd lay there sweating until the bed was soaked and always the whir-click of a fan that never touched the heat. We always smelled like mosquito ointment, yet we were covered with welts, which we scratched and dug at and made scabs to pick. I'd invent rain dances and rain voodoo dolls. Which seemed to work, but, now I have a secret August weapon. It's time to pull it out. It is the ONE and ONLY reason to have a month like yuky August.
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Does anyone like August and if so, why??