The Black Warrior Files: Nature Trumps Nurture—Again

What sets the South apart from the rest of the nation—and I mean really sets it apart—isn’t the drawl. Texans have that, too, and as any good Southerner will tell you, Texas is its own country and ain’t no friend of mine thank you very much. It’s not in the manners either (Midwesterners are quite a lovely and polite people, too), or the overuse of Cool Whip as one of the top five dessert ingredients (Jell-o pudding, sweetened condensed milk, Karo syrup, and butter, for you curious types). It’s not even the religious devotion to SEC college football, the prevalence of lifted trucks with oversized tires, or the “Honk if you love Jesus” and “W: The President” bumper stickers. What really sets the South apart isn’t something we’ve bought or created, rather, it’s a part of the region just as much as kudzu is a part of the landscape: Humidity.

You might think that you know about Humidity—that everybody knows about Humidity. She fills your bathroom, fogs the mirror, and wraps around you when you step out of a hot shower. She sits on your skin like plastic wrap when you walk into the locker room after your daily workout. These little, tentative brushes with Humidity might make you think you understand her, but really, you’re just flirting, waving to her when you think about it. Ignoring her when you don’t. We who live in the southeast, though, we passed flirting sometime between when Jesus walked the earth and the Baptists came to tell it on Red Mountain. We’ve long since married Humidity, divorced her, married her again, and resigned ourselves to the idea that she will always, always sprawl over more than her fair share of the bed and want to cuddle when you just want to sleep.

Such is Humidity’s presence in the South that I can write about her at the beginning of February because she waltzed in today without so much as knocking and plunked herself smack down in the middle of winter. My first clue came as I stepped from this morning’s shower and the residual drops of water left behind by my towel didn’t instantly evaporate into the thirsty air. My second was the practically audible sucking sounds of my skin rehydrating after two months of forced air central heating. By the time my hair burst into a frizzy halo and all the ringlets around my hairline came out to play, I was already past caring. trudging across campus somewhere around 11AM, I lost my will to be a productive and engaged citizen of the world and instead found myself longing for clichéd and vast veranda, for a Cracker Barrel rocking chair, and for a tall, clinking glass of sweet tea. The rest of the nation might think that we're just lazy and can't move at a normal pace, or that it’s the heat that slows Southerners down, and we let them think what they will because we don’t want them to know. In truth, we yearn to give in to Humidity’s seductive caress. To feel her warm breath on our hair. To hear her contented sighs as she bathes our glistening skin and sinks into our very bones until we are drunk with moisture, shedding coats and scarves without cares and driving home slowly, dreaming of cold fruit and cold drinks in tall, clinking glasses. Even at the beginning of February.

The camelia buch outside of Gorgas House on U of A's campus also likes the humidity.