Mama always said there was something about the heat that just made people open up. She said that it didn’t work inside air-conditioned, insulated houses that kept your body cool and your mouth tucked tightly away with your own thoughts. I did not understand what she meant – after all, people talk inside and outside; winter or summer…what difference does it make? But it was on the hot, hot summer days, when the sun couldn’t seem to get any closer, and the spring winds had finally blown away, that Mama’s words finally made sense.

Mama and I would go for walks when no one else dared venture out into the molten, bright air. It was just me and Mama, our bare feet burning on the dusty roads and our hair bleaching beneath the sunlight. The heat had a way of seeping through our skin until we sweat from our bones; the humidity was so thick we could see a haze of it, mingling with the gnats. It made the back of our necks felt like the sun was lashing us for daring to walk beneath its domain.

  I used to hate the heat. It always made me feel claustrophobic, because no matter where I stood, which way I turned, or even if I tried to find shade, it was always there: pressing and oozing against me, smothering my breath. Mama enjoyed that heavy heat, but I used to dread the long walks…if anything, they served to remind me how much I loved icy, blistering winter.

It was in those hottest days of summer that Mama’s words would come true. We would be on one of our lonely barefoot walks when she’d become the victim of her own wisdom. It was as if the words were melted out of us, like the way cakes always sagged in the heat. She would start by telling me things she remembered from her grandfather’s farm in Arkansas. He owned hundreds of acres in the wide open hills and rivers. Mama would deepen her voice to mimic him and then say, “‘Don’t ever retire,’ Papa Charlie always said. ‘The days get long.’ We never understood,” she would confess as we walked past the hayfields that reminded her of home. “We loved his farm; we thought it was great…no school, no chores… you could go exploring all day in the hills, and fishing in the pond, and you could help him in his garden, and he’d always give us a big silver dollar when we were done helping.” She would shake her head, her coarse brown hair gleaming in the heat. “I don’t know where I put those silver dollars,” she would say sadly. “I guess he was right, though - his garden was always perfect. Not a blade of grass in it, because he had nothing else to do. ‘Don’t retire,’ Papa Charlie would say; ‘the days get long.’”

Mama would tell me everything about growing up in the Arkansas River Valley, playing softball in the smothering heat, and fishing for catfish with her three siblings. “It was bloody, messy work - flies were crawling all over us, because of the bloody meat we’d fish with, and it was just a sticky mess,” she would say. She could go on for hours in reminiscence, and I could listen as long as she talked. 

I suppose Mama was always right. We could walk and talk for endless hours in the sweltering sunlight, and we would swap our fears and our joys as the sun melted us and turned our hair to molten blond. There’s nothing quite like the endless summer days that make a person remember their roots: the countries they came from, the people they’ve seen, and the blood they share. Sometimes, it just takes a little sunlight to remember.