I was mowing a bit over the weekend and planting a few things. It was hot and
It was hot and humid, but I didn’t know how hot and how humid until I was leaning over a tub and realized I had big drops of sweat rolling off my face every three or four seconds and splashing into the potting soil. I was wearing what has become my typical
I was wearing what has become my typical hot weather clothes - short-sleeved shirt, cargo shorts and work boots.
I was going to wipe my forehead with the bottom of my shirt, but realized that the shirt was already soaked. So, no point.
I soon retired to the porch with a cold bottle of water and thought about my Grandpa Blansett.
I don’t think I ever saw him when he wasn’t wearing a long-sleeved khaki shirt.
Sometimes he wore khaki pants, sometimes overalls, but the khaki shirt was a constant no matter the weather.
Mowing yards or going fishing, sitting on the porch on summer afternoons. Always the longsleeved khaki shirt with the cuffs buttoned.
He’d spent most of his life as a share-cropper and worked outside year-around with no protection from the sun except a long-sleeved shirt and the wide-brimmed hat he continued to wear even after he was long through farming.
My best-friend’s grandpa, Clayton Tweedy, whom all of us called “Pa,” was the same way, except he wore Roundhouse overalls and a gray Van Heusen long-sleeved every day that I knew him.
As an adult, I was a pall-bearer at his funeral and remember thinking how appropriate it was that he was buried in overalls and a longsleeved gray shirt.
When I was in high school, I worked summers for a farmer named Charles Morrow.
Charles was from the old school, even if he wasn’t that much older than me.
He, too, wore overalls every day, along with a flannel shirt buttoned at the neck.
I spent a lot of 12-hour days driving a tractor in the high fields and knew the value of a longsleeved shirt when bucking bales. You could incur some series scratches and scrapes hefting and tossing bales that included the occasional blackberry vine, but that was too hot for me.
I cut the sleeves out of several cotton shirts and wore them every day. They let the air circulate and seemed cooler to me.
One day I asked Charles why he wore flannels and he said: “Once you start sweating and the shirt gets soaked, the evaporation keeps you cool. And they’re protection from the sun.”
Ok. I get the part about sweating. My grandma had an evaporative window cooler, so I understood the process.
But the exposure to the sun? What possible harm could there be in sitting on a tractor 12 hours a day all summer long in the Oklahoma sun?
Well, in review, perhaps there was a bit of risk in it. Five decades later, I have to let the doc examine my face and forearms and the backs of my hands so he can freeze off any precancerous spots. He usually gets three or four per trip.
Charles is well into his 80s now and five will get you twenty that he’s never had to freeze a single spot due to sun exposure.
So, maybe the old guys of that era knew more than the old guys of today.
But I still have trouble with the idea of wearing a flannel shirt on a 90-degree day.