We are in the middle of the Dog Days of summer. It is so hot it is almost tempting to stay inside with air conditioning and not even go fishing. Any activity outside is miserable.
The Dog Days get their name from the Dog Star Sirius. At least that is the official version. To us in the south this time of year is called Dog Days because it is so hot outside that the dogs won’t come out from under the porch!
I grew up in a big wood house with a tin roof. We didn’t have air conditioning. We had to rely on fans and open windows to try to stay somewhat cool in the house. At night a fan would blow on the bed to let us sleep. I used to love to place a fan so it blew under the sheet, making a kind of tent with air moving across me.
That house was so old it sat on stacks of rocks supporting the big floor beams. When we tore down that house to build another in the early 1960s we found ax marks on those floor beams, showing they had been hand-hewn from big pine trees. The heart of pine beams had turned to lighter wood as they aged.
We found out why the dogs liked it so much under the house and porch. That was the coolest place around except in the water of the branch. My brother and I, and our friends, played under there for hours. At places the beams were several feet off the ground and we could almost walk under them.
Our playing under there ended when daddy caught my brother, three years younger than me, when he was about five years old. He had taken some paper feed sacks under the house and was in the process of building a campfire!
I loved the sound of rain on the tin roof of that house. During the day it meant the house cooled off and was more comfortable. When it rained at night the drumming of the raindrops cooled the house and lulled me to sleep.
One treat of summer was eating a cold watermelon on a hot day. We would put them in the big walk in egg cooler and they got nice and cold. In the side yard under a big pecan tree there was a wooden platform about eight feet square and a foot high. It was the perfect place to cut a watermelon and eat it.
Mama had a big butcher knife in the kitchen we used to cut the watermelon. It was so old and well-used the blade was concave from years of sharpening. I always wanted to use it to cut bites of watermelon from my slice, but was not allowed to handle it until I was about eight years old.
Even that was too young. One of the first times I was allowed to use it I cut all the red from my rind and enjoyed it. Then, for some reason, with the rind on the wood platform, I thought it would be a good idea to stab it with the knife.
When I stabbed straight down my right hand slick with watermelon juice slide down the handle and the blade. I can still remember looking at my palm as I opened it and seeing a gash that opened raw meat before the blood started gushing. My parents wrapped my hand and took me to the emergency room at the hospital eight miles away.
It took eight stitches to close the cut. I still have a faint scar running across my palm. Mom was standing beside me on my left side as the doctor worked on my right hand extended on a table. I wanted to watch the doctor but she turned my head away.
After a few minutes she asked me why I was staring at her eyes. Then she realized I was watching the doctor work on my hand in the reflection in her glasses.
We always went barefoot all summer long and our feet got tough, but not tough enough to stop a nail. There was an old barn near the house that was falling apart and we loved playing in it. But several times each summer we would step on a board with a nail in it and stab it into our feet.
Back then the cure was simple. Daddy would clean the nail hole, put a penny on it then a hunk of fatback on top of the penny and wrap it. The penny and bacon was supposed to pull the poison out. And I guess it worked, I never died, but I may have extra copper in my veins.
Most kids now are so protected and restricted by their parents I can’t imagine them getting injured as much as I did. But I survived, and even the memories of injuries are not so bad almost sixty years later.