Louisiana Heat

One thing I love about living in SoLa was riding through its southern most points to where not a tree will grow...roads are limited...you could easily see for miles, any growing thunderstorm, anything. You could go at the right time of day, roll the windows down one hour and have warm wind rushing in to bathe the interior with warmth......turbulent sounds that are always louder than the Indie you're blasting already. Our summers are hot, you can ask anybody that and get the same pandemic question. Some days, the humidity is harsh enough to make you feel like you should be swimming to your destinations. It's even more interesting on days where not a gust....a breeze nor a zephyr isn't even thought of by mother nature. Supposedly our climate is humid-subtropical with moderate to severe summer rain-spells or seasons. Summers here can reach as cool as 70 and as hot as 100 with heat indexes from the suffocating humidity to 115-120 on some days...Brutal yes?!
Last summer, the dreadful summer of 2009...I decided to tackle on a summer job, as a technician in my dad's small at-home type of business helping clients with landscaping, etc. Downtown Abbeville is where we spent the majority of it, applying a thick double coating of water-seal that was more like syrupy paint from before sunrise-sunset with a cool-off break....and every morning we would wake up early to beat the sun, doing as much as we could on whatever tasks the clients needed service with. Cruising through Abbeville at that time of morning....with the air still cool from the lows of the lower 70's, I was always still sleepy, never ready to leave the truck. About an hour in the sun would rise...and so would the temperature by the minutes. I always tied a white t-shirt around my head to protect myself from inconvenient flows of sweat into my eyes and to block the sun of course. My little brother became dizzy several times as a result of not wearing anything on his head that month. It was like this...every single day in June....but July, the days after my birthday, is when it would rain and rain every day for a few hours and clear up. Turns out for the whole month of June, a high pressure system sat over Louisiana, kept the skies clear of clouds and hopes of rain, for the whole hot month of June. Those cool off breaks, the majority of outdoor workers would seek shelter from the sun since we live in the sunbelt region of the SoLa. I have to say though, July truly saved me. We never went back there to see if more work was needed, which I'm sure there was...I was just tired of having to be this exhausted. It was like summer returned to normal for what we're use to during summer months. The days would start off mostly clear, warm, humid, but breezy and as clouds develop, some disappeared, but some don't. They become cells, wall clouds, hail cores from that one little morning survival cloud. And if you're a cloud watching person, time-lapsing the growth of a cloud into a city sized cloud is amazing. The cells and showers also relieve the south from the heat, giving name to our climate...humid-subtropical as well as visited by the occasional hurricanes.

This is just a few hours outside my bedroom window from morning to noonish