Joane Sherman’s column: When you’re hot you’re hot

There was a time when all I noticed were two types of weather: hurricane and not a hurricane. These days, all I think about is the weather. Especially hot weather. 

Right now it’s hot. Maybe when this is published, we will have turned that August corner into cooler weather. (Are you listening God? It’s me, Joanne.)

So, how hot is it?

It’s hot hot. It’s so hot that last week people who never sweat were blotting away trickles and standing in puddles of their own making. I always knew that some people dripped sweat. I’ve even sat behind them in church. I just never expected that one day I’d be one of them. 

Up until recently I was a person who did not sweat. Ever. Always disgustingly cool. Oh sure, I might perspire just a tad, but that’s not sweating — that’s glistening and some women look radiant when they glisten. 

I don’t know what changed, but two Saturdays ago at the Havens House Farmer’s Market, on the third or fourth or 11th day of the heatwave, I felt an unfamiliar, icky, prickly sensation on my scalp. I reached up, touched something warm and wet and screamed, “Omigod! Call 911. I’ve been shot in the back of the head and I’m bleeding.”

My husband — not as alarmed over the situation as I felt he should have been — offered to take a look but I refused to let him near me because when it’s hot like this my number one rule is no touching. I poked around at the back of my head and when I looked at my fingers they were not covered with blood, but they were wet. I cannot tell you what a disappointment it was to realize I hadn’t been shot, but had joined the ranks of people who drip sweat.

The sweating hasn’t stopped; I’ve been dripping steadily for almost three weeks now. I was complaining about the hot weather to several friends inside the air-conditioned post office. That’s where we meet in the mornings to sweat together and whine about the hot weather. We used to sit at the counter at the Pharmacy, but when it’s this hot and we wear shorts, it nearly takes medical intervention to unstick our legs from the stools. It’s not pretty and worse, it draws a crowd. 

While I blotted my wet forehead with a jury duty summons, one of the contrarians in the group commented, ”Except for the excessively hot days and the high humidity, and if you don’t count the occasional hurricane, a couple of nor’easters each year, the annual drought, the 100-year floods every two years, that summer when it rained 11 weekends in a row and last winter’s multiple snowstorms, we have perfect weather here and we really shouldn’t complain.”

I never did like that woman and the remark might just get her kicked out of the women-who-drip-sweat club. We’ll vote at our next regular meeting held in the frozen food aisle at the IGA where we convene each afternoon and stake out positions in front of the frozen pizza cooler, pretending to read nutrition labels.

There is only one person I know who isn’t walking around whining and all wilted because of this hot weather. No matter how high the temperature or humidity soars, this woman never looks like she’s feeling the heat. Every single summer I keep my eye on her, stalking, watching for that telltale trickle trail, but I’ve never even seen her glisten. Not even on those “the thermometer says 87 but it feels like 104” days we’ve had lately. This cool lady doesn’t sacrifice good taste and/or decency for comfort, either. I ran into her last week on the steps of the Pharmacy. I was dressed in my usual hot-weather outfit: baggy T-shirt, cotton shorts, flip-flops and the minimum underwear required by law (my mother’s law). 

She wore what she normally wears on the hottest days of the year: silk blouse, linen skirt and a full face of makeup, above a lovely, two-strand pearl choker. We chatted for a few minutes under that blazing sun and I could feel the prickle of the trickle on the back of my head. I didn’t even bother to check because I knew I hadn’t been shot, it was that darn sweat thing happening again. 

“You don’t look too well, dear,” my friend said, placing her cool, dry hand on my clammy arm, “Maybe we should go inside.”

I held the door for her and insisted she go ahead of me. As I stepped behind her I saw a dark speck on the back of her silk blouse. A tiny piece of lint, I thought. But it didn’t brush off because it wasn’t lint. It was the teensiest trickle of sweat.

That’s how hot it is!