Feels Like

Someone lower the broiler heat; we are starting to burn. It’s the 187th day of August here in Kansas. Yes, you read it correctly. If the temperatures are in “feels like” terms, so are the days in this month. Each day with these temperatures feels like a month on its own. We are cooking here, and it’s not steaks. Well, not the bovine steaks, anyway. I do feel like an overcooked sirloin. Does anyone have any gravy?

Don’t Get Crazy

Before any of you go off on the global warming tangent, this is not the reason. We get this hot in Kansas every year. The month varies, and the length of consecutive days varies too, but it is normal.

La Niña or El Niño determines when we get this hot. In La Niña years, which we just got out of, May is the convection month. In El Niño, it’s August and sometimes into September. Either way, those two months, in whatever cycle we are in, are brutal. I’ll take August over May, though. When we get them in May, we tend to get too much spring rain.

Those are the years when most Kansans have indoor pools. The problem is that the pools are in the basement, and there’s very little sunlight to tan in there. It’s a mess: a huge mess. We had back-to-back years of round-the-clock shop-vac duty just so we wouldn’t drown. And then there were the chickens.

What the Flock?

We had chickens in our backyard. Yup, on top of being a writer of woes, an amateur crayon doodler, a microwave queen, or a kitchen slave, I owned the title of chicken rancher. We started the adventure during COVID, when the world was going insane over toilet paper frenzies. We figured there could be a food shortage or a run on the protein bank, so we would have eggs on hand and a nice source of income at the rates eggs were going for then. We had a dozen.

Chickens, incidentally, are fun to raise. They are pretty low-maintenance and eat bugs. They eat everything that isn't nailed down, so don’t go cheering yet. The Dirty Dozen decimated my flower beds, ate all my herbs from those beds, and were getting ready to have a robust salad from my husband’s outdoor railroad when we enacted the Fence Cutting Wars and sequestered them to only a third of the backyard.

In May, one of the early years, the heat dome began, and I discovered hens pant when they are too hot. They were stressed, and it was horrible to watch. We filled 5-gallon buckets with water and plunged them in so their feathers would become waterlogged and cool them off. I went out every thirty minutes to hose them down, too. Nothing lasted, and the first year like this was exhausting and miserable.

Side Note

My husband is a saint, by the way. He tolerated my spoiling the hens, even though he hates birds. He built them a huge, elegant hen house, then converted the original hen run and hen house into a nursery sanctuary for brooding females, which needed to sit on eggs to hatch their young. I call him a saint because when I hatched the hare-brained scheme to air-condition the garage and build them temporary staycation quarters, he let me.

Note: If you ever complain about the price of eggs, think again. I did the calculations, and I think our own dozens cost hundreds of dollars, including housing, air conditioning, electric doors, heaters, gourmet organic feed, and so on. I may have forgotten to mention that I spoiled them.

I also named them all. I have Eggweena Ravenclaw, Hennifer Aniston, and Hennifer Lopez for the two blue egg layers. Chick-ira, Mother Clucker (everyone’s favorite name), Princess Layer, Henrietta Lange (from a TV series), Amelia Egghart, Henneth Paltrow, Meryl Cheep, and Yolk-o-ono. You get the picture.

For several years, we battled the inferno in this state. It begs the question: how on earth did people live out there without air conditioning? Deodorant is a relatively modern invention. Imagine the smell. Yuk. The sour stench of human body odor is disgusting.

Nothing would grow. I planted vegetables year after year, and nothing grew. Yes, I know I forgot to mention: I was a backyard amateur botanist and produce wrangler. I was good at it. Mother Nature has nothing on my green thumb. Well, not until the hellfire baked us. Then I was a prime failure at it all. About the only thing I could grow in those years was weeds. Yup, weeds.

If the Heat Doesn’t Kill You, the Weeds Will

The Kansas weed situation is a story in itself. Just know, aside from hell on earth, it is next in line for the most horrible experiences in life. I am not exaggerating.

We are now on the umpteenth day of August here on Mercury, and no one knows when we will finally feel autumn. Our daytime temperatures are in the low 100s, and evening temps are in the upper 70s, yet it still doesn’t feel cooler.

Every morning, I ask the other Alex in the house what the forecast is, and the commentary begins. “Oh, it’s going to be a scorcher out there again.” “The high today is just 100, but the feels-like is going to be 110: stay hydrated.”

Day after day, the same old thing on repeat. It’s so bad, vacationing in Florida to cool off in August feels like a real thing. I swear, any minute now, some wicked little red creature with a tail is going to pop out from behind a bush. And I thought I was a good girl all my life. This isn’t hell, is it? You never know, given what’s going on in the world today.

Doomsayer

Alexa said today there will be no reprieve from our torture for the rest of this month. She said, “Maybe in September.” Maybe. Ugh! “Alexa, you’re fired!”

Until then, we will continue to roast our corn on the cob while it is still on the plant, pop the corn the same way, get all our beef precooked, and watch the beauty of a brown, withered landscape cry out for water and shade.

It’s hot.

Thank you for sweating it out with me. Wave or clap in my direction for a breeze.

( Published by The Gravity on Medium, August 2026)

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