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Posted April 2026Ah, spring. The birds are singing, the trees have burst into verdant fullness, and the Saturday hymn of lawnmowers and trimmers fills the air. My sister in Las Vegas is thrilled. She loves summer, even in Vegas, where you could roast a Thanksgiving turkey on the sidewalk. Jacqueline is cold natured, and she's been known to wear a sweater when it's ninety degrees.
On the other hand, I’m depressed. I think I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, but it has to do with more sunlight, not less. I hate everything about summer, except maybe not having to scrape ice off the windshield. I hate heat; I hate humidity; I hate bugs on my paper plate of food; and I hate the weather anchors who gloat when we’ve hit another heat record. Summer storms help, but my brown grass tells me we can’t buy a good rainfall these days. It’s a genetic issue—my ancestors were English and Irish, so I’m not programmed to live in the tropics, or the desert, as the case may be. I’m pretty determined, moreover, never to live farther south than I do now.
There’s another problem with summer (I’m ignoring spring, since we only get about 5 days of it), and that’s sports. Football is my game; I was watching it with my Dad back in the 50’s and 60’s. I remember Lou Groza, Johnny Unitas, and the 1967 Ice Bowl between Dallas and Green Bay. Maybe it’s the ADHD, but I like sports with a lot of movement. Soccer is great, except it takes so long for someone to score, but football is my game.
Fortunately, my husband is also a football nut, although we follow different levels of the game. He actually kind-of, sort-of, went[ish] to class at Ole Miss for a couple of semesters, so he’s a solid Ole Miss fan. He believes the college game is more exciting, more pure. I tease him that it’s really semi-pro, and it lost its purity a couple of generations ago. But for both of us, the end of football season feels like the funeral of a close friend, and we scramble to find other sports to fill our need to agonize over something. But what?
Well, there’s the NFL draft next month, and we have a particular reason to be interested, aside from the players from Mississippi colleges. It started during COVID, when many public schools cancelled their football seasons. For a lot of kids, football is their ticket to college, so a group of boys in the Delta got together and transferred to a small private school, Greenville Christian Academy. The guys were from different schools, so they hadn’t played together, but Greenville Christian became a powerhouse. We got interested in the story and went to several games, watching them beat mighty Oak Grove on a warm night, with no subs but lots of pickle juice. After the game, my husband asked a couple of the kids for their autographs, and I don’t know who was more thrilled.
One of those young men is Chris Bell, from Yazoo City, who went on to play for Louisville and became recognized as one of the top wide receivers in the country. He was projected to go in the second, or maybe even the first round, until he tore his ACL last season. We’ll be anxiously watching on April 23 to see how much that has affected his chances. Wherever he lands, watch out for Chris, he’s going to be good. And we still have his autograph!
But back to activities called “sports” that are not football. Maybe people are most interested in games they played as a child. Obviously, I couldn’t play football, and soccer didn’t exist back then in the Mississippi Delta. As they used to say, we didn’t know there was any-such-of-a-thing. With regard to ball sports, there was another issue involving my left eye, which doesn’t really work much. I was always a lot likelier to get hit in the face with a ball than to catch it.
Despite this vision thing, in the days of half court girls’ basketball, I actually played on the practice squad. Since I was on the guard side of the court, my lack of shooting skills was irrelevant. All I had to do was to get in people’s way and be a general nuisance, which, apparently, I was pretty good at. Intercepting a pass, not so much. Then everybody else got their growth spurt and moved on to the high school team. (I waited until my 30’s for my growth spurt, but it never happened.) At least now I can watch girls’ basketball, which is a bit slower than the men’s game, and easier to follow anyway.
There’s also golf, which I’ve finally learned a little bit about, thanks to Hubby. It’s slow, but it has the benefit of television coverage, which can always show another player teeing off while your guy is off in the rough, looking for his ball. Tennis is a no-go, despite featuring a bouncing ball. Obviously, I could never play, and I know next to nothing about the game.
And then there’s baseball. Ugh. First, I’ve always resented the attitude of baseball fans who act like baseball is more intellectual, and, therefore, superior to football. I call B.S Have these people never seen an NFL playbook? You can’t be a dummy and play football at the college or professional level, but you can play baseball without even speaking English. And it doesn’t take much brainpower to spit chewing tobacco.
Additionally, my biggest complaint about baseball is that it’s soooooo slow. I figure if you started vacuuming your house between pitches at the beginning of the game, you’d be done by the fourth inning. Baseball’s saving grace is that you can watch it in the air conditioning when it’s 97 degrees outside. If it wasn’t for beer, I don’t know how anybody could watch it outside. Of course, that brings other problems—I once missed a grand slam at a Cubs game because I was in the ladies’ room.
So, did I mention that I hate summer? Between heat, humidity, and baseball, I can’t find much to recommend it. In fact, I could get behind some legislation moving the Fourth of July in the south to sometime in the fall. Outdoor summer weddings should be outlawed, and large fans and shade should be mandatory at crab boils and barbecues. In the meantime, I’ll just hunker down until football season. And I’ll go back outside sometime in September. Or October Or whenever David Hartman can conjure up a cool spell. Until then, look for me in the air conditioning, under a ceiling fan, watching America’s real game.
