Free Milking the Moon by Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark

dug holes and gotten into Uncle Francis’s wood shop, I needed to eat. And my grandfather walked down to Water Street and then walked up and down the street, talking to the other produce people. He couldn’t have had a sandwich and a cup of tea after all that.
    Then: Close the shutters, pull the drapes, lie down, and Take A Nap. During that time of day when it was too hot to do anything, people just didn’t even try to do anything. There was no air-conditioning, and people just didn’t fight the climate then the way they do now. They closed the shutters, pulled the drapes, and took a nap. Our brains only function for two weeks out of the year in this climate anyway. Weariness, bone laziness, gets in the blood because we ain’t adapted to this climate yet. Even if we are born here, we don’t realize that three million generations of something more northern is suffering subtropical languor. We are in the subtropics down here, and that means a constant battle between humanity and humidity. We just ain’t adapted. It is only by conscious efforts we keep the motor running during the six months of August. One reason I believe in the nap is, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. Alligators nap, possums nap, cats nap. Everything in this climate naps. Not even monkeys come out in hot weather like we have. They’re sitting in the trees picking little flakes of skin off each other’s shoulders. Quietly. During the heat of the day.
    Between one-thirty, say, and four o’clock, which was nap time, there was not a sound. Nobody would dare make a sound. If someone was awake, he or she would be very silent and move barefoot through the house so as not to wake up those who were napping. Nap time was sacred. I think that’s why people lived longer and were mostly in a better humor. I can remember when, at three o’clock in the afternoon on a summer day downtown, there was no sound. No motion. There was total silence and stillness. Our society would be better off if that were still the custom: fewer divorces, fewer murders, fewer nervous breakdowns, fewer bankruptcies. Because in our climate, people change their minds constantly and are quick to take offense, so lifelong feuds are born.
    So after lunch, everybody just crawled into some corner and fell asleep. Rebecca would retire to a rocking chair on the back porch and doze. She might have darning in her hand, but she wasn’t darning. I loved to sleep in the front parlor, which was used only for the official visit when the priest came to dinner. It was very cool in there because it was kept closed always. Of course, the moment the sun was going to hit the house they would close the shutters and close the curtains to keep everything cool inside. There were glass transoms over all the doors between the rooms which could be flipped open by a long metal rod that came down and rested on the door frame near where the doorknob was. You could push that up or push that down to open and close the transoms. Usually the windows in the front room would be left up, with the shutters closed, so that what air was moving—and we were close enough to Mobile Bay that there was always some air moving—came in the lower part of the window and went through all the open transoms in the house. If you moved intentionally at a slow pace, got everything done before ten o’clock, and took a nap after lunch, you wouldn’t even have dreamed of inventing air-conditioning.
    *
    At night, porch life went on forever. All ages and colors sat together on the porch, rocking and fanning and telling stories. When the gossip got really good, my grandmother would switch from English to French.
    “And nobody knew where she was, they looked high and low, nobody could find her, and then she was seen in New Orleans with—”
    And the rest would be in French, so that little eavesdroppers couldn’t hear the rest of the story. I knew then that one day I would learn French, because French was the gossip language. All the