The day is hot, in the low 80’s, and it will stay hot tonight. That August heat is the reason it is my least favorite summer month. Adding to the misery of the heat is the humidity, thick damp air which just hangs. My father always described it as so thick you could cut it with a knife. Right now it is sunny. but rain is predicted for this evening, an 88% chance of rain.

I never dreaded going back to school. By the end of August, summer had worn down. The playground was already closed, and I was left to my own devices to fill the days. My mother had taken us school shopping with stops for new shoes, a new skirt and blouse for my school uniform and new school supplies. We were just about ready. The last thing was the bath, an out of time bath, a bath on a Tuesday night.

One of the skills I learned in Ghana was how to pluck a chicken. I haven’t plucked one since. One year we bought three or four chickens for Thanksgiving because we could only find one turkey, not enough to share. Someone else dispatched the birds. We put their caucuses in a metal container about the size of a small trough. They didn’t run around without their heads, but a few bodies kept jumping out of the trough. A few even flapped their wings. We knew the biology behind it, but it was creepy nonetheless. After all that activity, we plucked their feathers, pulled off the pinions and got them ready for the fire.

This is the month of the spiders. Even the tiniest of them is weaving webs, but, unlike Charlotte, mine don’t weave messages. I’ve never been afraid of spiders. I think it a bit silly that people scream and run when they see spiders. I save them. Sometimes I have to move a spider from the sink if it gets trapped. I do clear webs as they seem to be everywhere joining anything. One giant web hung down from the ceiling, and others went across the lintels of the wooden doorways. Some of the webs remind me of the end of the movie The Fly, the original movie from 1958. The fly with the head and one arm of the scientist is caught in the web. The spider is inching toward that fly which is screeching, “Help me. Help me.” The spider didn’t look all that real, but the abject fear on the man’s face was horrifying. I can still see it in my mind’s eye.

This entry was posted on August 20, 2026 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.