Doggone Doghouse Days of Summer
By: Angela Gillaspie © September 2007
As July melts into August, the heat around here can climb up to the triple digits. The light sweet summer breezes become sluggish and heavy with humidity, and the Dog Day Cicadas emerge after their 13-year nap to fill the hills and hollers with their loud love calls: "RrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr!"
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As most folks know, this sultry part of summer is called the "Dog Days of summer." My Granny didn't like them one single bit because of the many superstitions surrounding this temperate canine period. It made her nervous and cranky, of course I made her nervous and cranky, too.
Granny used to watch over my sisters and I during the day while Momma and Daddy were at work. My sisters never gave her much trouble, but I had a load of trouble to give and this kept me in the doghouse and at the whuppin' end of her hickory switch. Keeping a low profile around Granny was hard - especially during the Doggone Doghouse Days of Summer.
Being reckless, I wore skinned elbows and knees constantly, and this drove Granny nuts. She warned me to be careful, believing that injuries didn't heal as well during Dog Days. To compensate for slow healing, she painted me up one side and down the other with Mercurochrome and slapped on some bandages. I looked like a walking red-splotched ad for Band-aid.
I did try to be careful, but there were so many things to get into, for example, during one late July, the city finally decided it was time to pave the dirt road by our house. It was like watching a stinky-muck-muck parade. After the road was scraped flat with a bulldozer, a dump truck and gaggle of sweaty guys with shovels covered the road with gravel. And if I remember right, next there was a machine that sprayed tar pitch creosote over the gravel. A big yellow steamroller finished the parade as it rolled over and over the tar-coated gravel pavement to squish it down. It was hot, stinky work - how I wished I could be in the middle of all that black muck!
In the hot August sun, the air shimmered above the new pavement, making it appear to be roasting. The pavement softened and some of the tar would puddle in the shallow points of the road. It was great fun popping the tar bubbles and writing ugly things about my sisters in the tar. I didn't get caught performing my tar art, but I got busted when the creosote wouldn't come off my new Sunday shoes. Back to the doggone doghouse with me!
Grandpa loved this time of summer, as he sat in his rickety lawn chair, he departed many nuggets of Dog Day Wisdom. "Dog Days are a good time for huntin' dogs. They can pick up a scent from a mile away. Shoot, I had this lazy hound, Heiny, that couldn't find his butt if'n he was a layin' on it, but during Dog Days, he could track a coyote all the way from Aint Pearl's to Wilbur's shed down at the lake!"
Dog Days begin when the Dog Star rises and sets with the sun - usually between mid-July and mid-August. We can see Sirius in the wintertime if we look at the Southern sky at night.
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Granny warned me for the umpteenth time about Dog Days; she fanned herself with a folded newspaper and admitted, "That Dog Star hides all year until July, then it rises up with the sun, and with both of 'em shinin' - it makes it real hot. The cows get sick, my corns ache, and I get gas real bad." (You bet she did, but I never could get up enough courage to tell her that her stomach ailments might've had something to do with all that cabbage she ate rather than it being the Dog Days.)
Granny had a few more Dog Day warnings, including:
I had to admit that overall, there was something strange about Dog Days, how else could a sweet thing like me ever get in trouble?
I reckon some of those Dog Day superstitions are true, but it's the kids - not the snakes - that get meaner, and it's the adults that go mad - not the dogs.
Stay tuned for more of Southern Angel's fun memoirs!