Our Summer Queen, S.J. Tucker: The Summer I Know

I grew up in the Mississippi River Delta in southeast Arkansas, where the state lines blur near the tops of Louisiana and Mississippi, and life still moves at a very calm pace for most folks.

I spent half my summers as a child outside playing softball, swimming, or riding my bicycle through my small hometown.  I spent the other half indoors, hiding in the freezing embrace of central air conditioning, as far away as four walls could get me from ravenous mosquitoes and the thick air of Southern Summer Humidity.

Where I come from, Summer is not a nice girl.

She is not gentle.  She is fierce.

She is not there to entertain you.  Rather, she’ll eat you alive.

She turns the air to soup and the water to paradise, but you can’t enjoy the latter for long at the wrong time of day, lest the insects carry you off.

She scorches the fields, drains the rivers, and chars the skin.

She is the divine feminine in her Destroyer aspect, unapologetic and terrible.

But you can bet your ass I was glad to see her when school let out for the year.

Every time.

And to tell the truth, she could be generous to those of us who learned how to work with her, to celebrate as one until our buckets of sweat ceased to matter, to appreciate the play of her brutally colorful sunsets through the dry dust of a field at harvest.

Case in point: the yearly summer festival that still goes on in my hometown — Dumas, Arkansas — every July.

Get ready for it.

Ding Dong Days.

Yup.

Really.

What on earth, you may ask.

Ding Dong Days, founded the year I was born, was and is a weekend festival consisting of community theater performances (my first time on stage: age six, with all of my family around me), a Saturday morning parade (because if you try to have it in the afternoon, the high school marching band and the various pageant girls will melt clean away), a fish fry, a BBQ, concerts in the park, contests of all sorts, snowcones, church dinners, and yes, the crowning of a Ding Dong Daddy and a Ding Dong Mama each year.

Ding Dong Days was named for the 1920’s Phil Baxter song, “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas,” which was a very raunchy tune for its day.  The time-honored logo for the event is a cute drawing of a flapper gal, with bell-shaped hat and beads flying, and her dapper dan counterpart in his striped suit.  More from the source.

Natives of Dumas, Texas argue to this day that the song was written for them.

It could be even wackier. I did not, after all, grow up near Toad Suck.

Here’s an article about some of the other odd town names in my home state: For some reason, it fails to mention either Pickles Gap or Possum Grape.

The Ding Dong Days festival, above almost all other things (even trips to the municipal swimming pool for a break from the heat), was what showed me the kinder face of Summer. When we are children, we are more easily distracted from the kind of discomfort that 80% humidity plus temperatures upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit can offer. Balloons, ballgames, parades and music (not to mention time out of school) show us the kinder magic of what, in many flavors of folklore and tradition, is the earth’s true dying time.

I remember sweltering Independence Day evenings, running in and out of the street in front of our house with my father, to light small spinny things and Roman candles, and to hell with the mosquitoes.  I remember huddling under a blanket with my mother (the blanket was for bug protection, not comfort) in our back yard, watching my first meteor shower, late into the night. I remember afternoons of nothing much, staying inside to play, or riding my bike alone through sun and shade.

These days, I work hardest of all in summer, following the festival circuit with my guitar in hand, and I spend a significant amount of time in the Pacific Northwest.  They have found a way to extend springtime there, I tell you, but even there, at times, the fierce specter of Southern Summer finds me.  Last year, I spent Summer Solstice in Alaska, where the sun literally did not set at all. It thinks about it for a few minutes around 2am, but decides against it.  Glorious. Incredible.  Exhausting! I loved it there, but at times my host’s blackout window shades were the only things that allowed me to sleep. Summer ran me hard there, and what for many people is a season of rest is for me a season of much work, much activity.  Any Delta farmer will likely tell you the same: Summer is not a gentle mistress.  She will put you through your paces, and she will work you until you’re bone dry.

Soybeans.  Corn.  Rice.  Cotton.  Wheat.  Maize.  I’ve known the different fields of these crops by sight since I was small. There are places where they seem to stretch on forever, with only the tree-lined serpent of Bayou Bartholomew coiling among them to break the spell. The sound of my homeland summer is a merciful breeze amid the tall cotton; cicada song on all sides at Golden Hour, just before sunset; little frogs calling to each other across a lake under the vivid stars.

All of this, together with the anxiety of drought, the dust of archaeological digs, and the promise of Autumn to come if we can just stick it out, fills the cauldron of my Summer goddess.  It’s a bitter brew she serves, not for the faint of heart, and it most definitely gets into your blood.

Wherever you may be, and wherever your travels may take you this year, I give you the lesson and the blessing of my own childhood summers and many of the summers I see abroad as climate change sweeps us all into its claws: be fierce.  Be generous.  Be colorful.  Be who and what you are, no matter how hotly and how brightly you may burn.

In the name of bright Amaterasu; generous Selu; unstoppable Sekhmet: so mote it be.