Jim Bradshaw: August is a miserable month, and February, too

August has always been my least favorite month, and I suspect I am not alone.
The experts tell us that its hot, humid weather makes this the most physically stressful month of the year in south Louisiana. August temperatures get as warm as the body’s temperature, or warmer.
That means people who work or play outside can’t depend on the air around them to cool them. That makes our bodies work harder to cool themselves — and I can testify that the older the body, the harder the work.
But even as a kid I didn’t like August because, (1) it was almost time to go back to school after a carefree summer vacation, (2) it was so hot that I was required by the Grown-Ups to give up a good part of the last days of vacation to stay out of the sun, (3) that meant many afternoons sitting on a screened porch listening to the powerful WGN radio station giving the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs blowing another season.
Even with their almost guaranteed disappointment, I have been a Cubs fan for more than a half-century, probably because of those broadcasts, and that’s why I was one of the first people on the planet to order the T-shirt when they finally won their first World Series since 1908.
That pennant race made August 2016 almost acceptable, but it was still August, and the Cubs have since begun to return to their old form.
They’ve made a couple of runs at the championship since then, but at this writing are near the bottom of their division, 10 games out of first place, and talking about trading star players.
So, now I wonder again, “What’s to like about August?”
To begin with, August is the thief that cut February short. Before the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus decided he wanted a month named for himself, August was called Sextilis, the sixth month of the Roman year.
It had only 29 days back then, which I think was still too many.
But emperors being emperors, Augustus had to have a month named for himself, and it had to be just as long as anybody else’s month.
He monkeyed around with the calendar, renaming Sextilis, adding days here and subtracting days there, stealing a day from February and giving it to long, hot August.
I would say that he should have done it the other way around, except that February can be the second most miserable month of the year and the quicker we get past it, the better.
Why didn’t he choose a nice month like April to add days to? I’ll take April showers over August hurricanes any day.
Or he might have picked October and given the songwriters a headache as they tried to wax poetic about when the Augustus leaves come tumbling down.
Back in the 1700s, a poet named Robert Combe Miller called August, “Fairest of months! Ripe Summer’s Queen, the hey-day of the year with robes that gleam with sunny sheen.”
Either old Rob was hitting the mead pretty hard or there’s been a heckuva lot of climate change since then. The “hey-day of the year?” Indeed.
I guess over the years somebody else might have said something nice about August when they were in the throes of heat stroke or under some other influence, and I meant to look it up. But I had to go outside for half an hour in the afternoon heat to deal with a carpentry problem, and never got around to it when I came back inside.
The shaded thermometer on the back porch registered 99 degrees, the humidity was close to 100, I was hot and sweaty, and when I checked the baseball scores the Cubs were losing.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.