September in Houston means three things:
1) the mosquitoes triple in size due to all the West Nile they have ingested and passed on throughout the previous summer months.
2) everyone becomes a storm-tracker and posts maps of the Caribbean and Gulf up in their dining rooms and bust out the protractors and push-pins. They watch to see if the tropical depressions turn into tropical storms and then if they will develop into full-fledged hurricanes and then if they are ranked a 3 or a 5 and then OH MY GOD if they will hit land. Thanks to the Hurricane Paranoia that has struck the Gulf Coast in the past 2 years (not knockin’ the plight of New O, just sayin’…) if there is even the slightest hint of a hurricane making landfall near Houston—and I use the term “near” loosely as apparently “near” applies even to South Padre, a 7-hour drive south—everyone in the city promptly loses their minds and begins to evacuate and board their windows and we all have to go to Home Depot and buy every generator they have and eat everything in our fridges and fill all the bathtubs with water IN CASE the power and water go out. Which it never does.
3) FINALLY we get a break from the heat and stickiness, and the temperature drops to something below 104 degrees with 97% humidity.
Ok, granted, #3 only happens for one evening sometime in the month, while the other two listed go on and on and on and make September feel like The Month God Forgot, but the night the weather finally gives it a goddamn rest is sooooooo nice. Everyone who lives in Houston knows we don’t have actual seasons…we have really f’ing HOT and approximately 2 weeks of really f’ing COLD. The one night of moderately cool that September so graciously gives up is uh-mazing. It makes you want to turn off the A/C, throw open all the windows and do everything that you would normally do that evening on your patio. Cook on the patio? No sweat (pun intended)! Yoga on the patio? Sweet. Watch tv on the patio? Awesome. Sleep on the patio? Yesssss…until you remember that the mosquitoes are now the size of a 6-month old’s head and their normally small, albeit, annoying blood-suckers more closely resemble an epidural needle. Sleep inside, no matter how badly you want to camp on the patio. Really. You’ll regret it in the morning if you don’t. If you live to see the morning, that is.
That glorious night this year happened Tuesday of this week and do you want to know what we did? SK had a stabbing pain in his chest that we were pretty worried about and the dog WOULD NOT CALM DOWN and looked at me like, Bitch please… when I tried to take her outside. When Bella finally stopped flipping into the air and snapping her jaws at anything that came within 10 yards of her face and let me hook the leash to her collar, I took her down the three flights of stairs to her favorite little grass patch by the pool and it was only then, at 9:45pm, that I realized that this was the night! The night Houstonians wait all summer for! I did a little happy dance while Bella did her thing and then ran all the way up the stairs, practically falling through the door to tell SK that we HAD to get outside and enjoy the night, only to find him doubled over on the couch in pain. We both just sat there on the couch kind of looking at each other, then out the window, then back at each other. So yep. We sat our happy asses inside on the couch. All. Night. Long.
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