Daily Archives: September 3, 2020

One of the first Texasisms I was taught upon first moving to the Dallas area in 1979 was “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” Especially in North Texas, this understates the situation. While the summer so far has been remarkably mild, on a par with 1987, the last two weeks were as if someone decided “Wait a minute. This is TEXAS. We’ve got to get in a whole summer before Labor Day!” That’s pretty much what we got: hot and sunny every day, with a south wind that dropped relative humidity through the floor and sucked the moisture out of everything it caressed. The finale was on August 29, where the Dallas area broke a heat record last set when my in-laws were newlyweds and the famed Dallas “drought of record” was still raging. That Saturday night wasn’t much better: grass crunched under feet, opening the greenhouse door caused half the plants to wilt because of the oppressively low humidity, and the air was full of the smell of burning flint.

That was Saturday. Sunday started off with roiling thunderclouds and lots of flashing, but we get a lot of false alarms about rain in the summer. About an hour before opening the Porch Sale, though, I looked off to the west and thought “Hmmm, we have a wall of water coming right for us.” That wall of water hit, and kept coming, and kept coming, for the next three hours. The parking lot in front of the gallery became a kayak course, and it kept coming. The shrubbery and grassy medians in the industrial park started turning green again, and it kept coming. Honestly, it got so bad that I expected my sister to arrive and yell “For he IS the Kwizach Haderach!” For three solid hours, the rain kept coming, and then we got what we always get when a gullywasher storm hits. That is, full sun, light breezes, and that strange hum that we get at the end of every summer, where the earth slurps up every last drop of moisture and realizes that there’s still plenty of room for more.

The better news on all of this is that we’re going to have a stranger September than previously expected. For those outside of the Dallas area, the end of summer is a matter of perspective out here, because it ends when it ends. Normally, what most people call “summer” ends in the last week of September to the first two weeks of October, when we finally get rain, and the first day that might actually justify pulling out jackets and sweaters hits in the second to third week of October. (This doesn’t always hold true: November 2017 was best remembered for temperatures more suited for June, as I discovered the hard way upon having a gallery in a dying shopping mall where the owner didn’t want to fix the air conditioning system.) This Sunday, though, even though much cooler than the last several weekends, promises to be the last day for the foreseeable future with anything approximating average temperatures, and that first jacket day is supposed to hit this coming Wednesday. Both the plants and I can’t wait.

Anyway, the Porch Sales continue through September, and because the weather promises to be so much better than the usual Labor Day weekend conditions, this means a lot of new surprises. First and foremost is that this coming weekend, the Triffid Ranch tent is joined by Caroline Crawford Originals: it’s not quite the reopening of show season that we hoped to get in September, but it’s close enough. As always, masks are mandatory for everybody’s safety, and we’ll see you on Sunday morning at 7:00.