summer Lessons
Summer in Middle Tennessee does not arrive so much as it settles; the way a large man lowers himself into a chair that was not built for him, and by the time you notice it has already made itself comfortable and has no plans to leave before September. The humans in the house meet this the way humans always have, with the thermostat cranked down to a temperature that would offend a meat locker, the ice machine running around the clock like it is training for something, and the same tired complaint, muttered at least once a day since June, “cant nobody survive in this heat.” We say it every year. We survive it every year. The saying seems to be part of the surviving.
The Boyz have gone about the same problem with considerably more ingenuity and a great deal less cursing. I have spent June and most of July watching them work it out, which is its own kind of entertainment, cheaper than cable and considerably more honest.
The first lesson came early and came hard. A golden retriever’s fur coat, so useful in November, so photogenic in the Christmas card, is a genuinely poor piece of planning for a Tennessee July. Nobody consulted the dogs on this. Somewhere back along the evolutionary arc, a decision was made on their behalf, and now Morgan and Captain are left to live with the consequences, panting in the shade like two red and cream reminders that not every inherited trait ages well.
I have made peace with a great many things in my life, but watching a dog stand fully committed to ninety-five degree sun in a coat built for Minnesota winters is not yet one of them.
Captain worked out the second lesson, because Captain works most things out, given time and a reason to. The door to the living room has a lever handle rather than a knob, and Captain has apparently spent some private hours in contemplation of the fact that a lever, unlike a knob, does not require an opposable thumb so much as it requires persistence and the right angle of downward paw pressure. I do not know when he solved this. I only know that I have twice now walked into a closed house to find the living room door standing open and Captain already arranged on the hardwood floor inside it, looking entirely unsurprised to see me, the way a man looks when he has let himself into his own house and sees no reason to explain it.
Morgan, who arrives at his conclusions by different roads, discovered the third lesson by accident and has treated it since as settled doctrine. The AC registers on the floor, it turns out, are prime real estate. Morgan has claimed the one in the hallway with the confidence of a dog who believes squatter’s rights are a real and enforceable legal principle. He lies directly over it, cold air rising up through his belly fur, eyes half closed, utterly still except for the very tip of his tail, which moves now and then as if to confirm that yes, this is good, this is the good spot, and no, he will not be moving.
But it is the fourth lesson that says the most about the Boyz and, if I am honest, about most of us. The best place in the whole house, they have decided, is not fully in and not fully out. It is the threshold itself, the exact strip of flooring where the air conditioning from inside meets the shade from the porch outside. Both of them can be found there most afternoons, sprawled half in the doorway with French doors propped against their hindquarters, taking the best of both worlds and letting the open door remain a world without end. The flies have noticed this arrangement too, and have moved in accordingly, which the Boyz do not seem to mind. They have found their spot. Everyone else can work around it.
Come days end, the door closes. The flies stay outside where they belong, at least for now, and the house settles into that particular quiet that comes only after a long hot day has finally been talked into ending.
Tomorrow it will be ninety-five degrees again, and somebody in this house will say once more that “can’t nobody survive in this heat.” The Boyz will not bother to disagree. They will simply do it, the way they did today, which is to say better than I do.
